How we make the OneTeamGov podcast
This is the second of two blogposts in which we share our experiences of creating the OneTeamGov podcast. Read the first part here.
Having had the idea for the podcast, created a high level proposal, and got the buy-in, we now had to make it a reality. In line with our mission, we started with the people.
How we decide who to interview
We came up with a set of values that help to guide our decisions about who to speak to.
- We are intentionally inclusive. We seek out traditionally underrepresented groups*
- We provide a global perspective. We aim to represent a broad spread of nations
- We are grounded in practical action and better service delivery for users
- We are non-hierarchical. We look for people on the frontline as much as senior folks
- We are multi-purpose. Not just digital folks, but also policy and operations
- We are radical and disruptive. We look for people doing stuff differently
*non cis-male gender, people of colour, LGBTQ*, people with a disability, minority faiths, higher/lower age groups, parents and carers, lower socio-economic backgrounds, state school educated. The intersectionality of multiple diversity aspects.
We connect with people through the OneTeamGov community or on social media, and ask them (very nicely) if they’d be interested in chatting with us.
Before the interview
Once we’ve found our next interviewee, there’s lots we do to prepare:
- Desk research: finding out their background (we usually know some of this already), career history, what motivates them, any interesting stories or side projects
- Scripting: we work from a template to keep the structure roughly consistent, and then write out questions and themes we’d like to explore
- Logistics: arranging our schedules, sending out a calendar invite, and emailing the person with a list of question themes we plan to ask to give them a chance to prepare
This last part is the most complicated because we live in very different timezones to each other, and often also to our interviewee. The most common time slot we use is 4pm EST / 9pm GMT / 8am NZT, which seems to be a reasonable compromise.
The interview
We use ZenCastr to record interviews. We create a new episode on the production dashboard, then each guest (or location, if either me or Kamala are with the person) joins using a URL in their web browser. This works with inbuilt or external microphones. I bought this microphone based on a recommendation, and Kamala borrows one from her office.
During the interview Kamala and I working from our script in a live Google document. Often we’ll adapt questions on the fly, based on how the conversation is flowing. We assign groups of questions in advance, so we know who’s asking what, and use instant messaging to signal to each other when to move on.
Once we’re finished recording, each individual person/location has an audio track that we download and save for later.
After the interview
Kamala and I will listen back to the interview and reflect on what was discussed. We meet up again on Zencastr just the two of us and record ourselves reflecting out loud. This format was inspired by The Weeds and Nancy podcasts. We download our audio tracks and save them for the final edit.
We’re lucky enough to have a custom theme song, created by the awesome Dan Barrett. Having been tipped off about Dan’s electronic music talents, we cheekily asked if he might make us a theme song. Massive kudos to Dan for pulling it off based on our super random brief:
“something like the beginning of Paper Planes, like, upbeat and fun?”
We use this to intro and outro each episode, and to mark the transition between the interview and our reflections.
We use a free open source tool called Audacity for editing the audio files. Having never done anything like this before, editing has probably been the biggest learning curve. Their wiki is pretty comprehensive, which really helps, and there are lots of online tutorials to learn the basics and solve specific problems. This is the most time consuming part of the whole endeavour — it can easily take 5 hours to put together a half hour episode.
Publishing and promotion
We use a podcast publishing platform called Buzzsprout to distribute our episodes through the major channels. We chose Buzzsprout after doing lots of research, and we’ve found it to be a pretty seamless user experience.
There was an amount of initial setup and waiting around required to get our podcast pre-approved on the various channels: Apple Podcasts and Spotify took almost 4 weeks from submission to approval. Once that completed, we could then upload our audio file, add the supporting information (title, logo, description etc) and choose a publication date. Buzzsprout feeds your episode out into the world, and you can edit post-live if needed.
To maximise reach, best practice guidance is to publish on as many channels as possible. Buzzsprout handles the major ones, with the exception of SoundCloud which we manage manually. Apple Podcasts accounts for around two thirds of worldwide podcast listens, with Spotify next, so those two are particularly important. We’ve added our feed to as many other channels we could find — see our webpage for an exhaustive list.
We aim to publish an episode every two weeks, on Friday morning GMT. So far we’ve managed to keep this cadence, and have a good amount of unedited interviews in the backlog. It’s important that we maintain a regular drumbeat.
We announce each episode via the OneTeamGov Twitter account, adding a visual Twitter card made by the lovely Ben Lister, and promote it through our personal networks.
Recently we’ve added a section to the end of each episode reminding our listeners to subscribe — this is really important for building an audience base, and helps by nudging subscribers when a new episode goes live. So far we’ve had eight 5* ratings and two positive reviews on Apple Podcasts.
Buzzsprout has a built-in stats dashboard which gives us an idea of how we’re doing. So far we’re averaging around 200 full listens per episode. Excitingly, with each new episode we see those numbers jump up more quickly — which tells us people are subscribing. Unsurprisingly most listens happen on a mobile device.
We’ve seen some interesting stats around location — who knew we had a fanbase in Halifax (England)? It’s great to see listeners across several continents, though we hope to get better at reaching Asia and Africa in future.
And finally, merch! As part of the OneTeamGov Global event we were able to get a bunch of stickers printed to give to our interviewees, and Kamala and I each have a t-shirt with Joe Lanman’s beautiful logo design.
What’s next?
Producing the OneTeamGov podcast has been loads of fun, and we’re excited that it seems to be resonating with people. Our priorities for the next few months are to focus on creating great content and reaching as many people as possible. We have five interviews from OneTeamGov Global to process, and (hopefully) our first interview with someone on the frontline of public service delivery lined up next.
We’d love your thoughts on how we can reach more diverse audiences, suggestions for people to interview, and, if you enjoy our podcast, for a little help in sharing it with the world. You can find us on Twitter @kyliehavelock @KamalaHB or email us podcast@oneteamgov.uk
