Last November, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column about podcasting in higher education for the Feb. 2006 issue of University Business: “The Power of Podcasts”
With over 30,000 podcasts downloaded in 10 months, Allegheny College launched its podcasts, 15-minute interviews with a new guest every week, in April 2005. The host and producer of these podcasts, Mike Richwalsky, answered these questions last November.
1) You launched the Allegheny podcasts last summer. What’s the role of these podcasts in your communication web strategy? Why did your insitution decide to add podcasting to its communication/marketing mix?
I think the podcasts serve as a nice complement to the online and print marketing we do. Podcasts are interesting because they allow us to go into much greater detail than you can in a press release or a printed brochure, and do so in a conversational manner, something that I think makes a difference to people and allows them to make a more direct connection with Allegheny College.
The podcasts give us the opportunity to reach out to multiple audiences, not just prospective students, though we talk in our podcasts about admissions events and events geared at new students like Orientation. We know alumni, parents and friends are listening, so we talk about Reunion Weekend, our capital campaign, events and concerts on campus, and much more. We’ve interviewed alumni who have told great stories about how Allegheny College and the education they received here have helped them succeed in the business world. For current students, we’ve talked about internships, international study programs and research that students are doing with faculty.
I can think of a few examples where the podcasts have gone above and beyond what is sometimes available on just a web page or in a brochure. We recently talked with a theatre professor who was directing a show with our campus theatre troupe. In the podcast, we were able to get pretty in-depth about the show, the playwright and the themes of the show. We also talked about his motivations for choosing the show, the challenges he had faced in getting the show ready and the cast he assembled.
This past summer we interviewed several students who had just returned from study trips abroad. It’s one thing to read about a study trip to Ukraine, but to hear a student talk about interacting with local teenagers and her feelings about touring the area around Chernobyl, it was very compelling. She made it real, and I hope our current students who listened to it were persuaded to sign up for one of the trips this summer.
We started podcasting because it was a new and exciting way to reach out to people using a new medium that was just starting to gain momentum. Part of my job as a web administrator is to constantly evaluate new technologies and see where they may fit in here. This is one technology, similar to RSS, that made sense to take a closer look at. The rest, as they say, is history.
2) What did you tell your director, VP, President or Cabinet to convince them it was actually a good idea?
The first thing we did was get our key web stakeholders across campus together, and we pitched the idea to them. Many hadn’t heard of podcasting, so we educated them, including giving them examples of podcasts and some recent news and magazine articles about podcasting. They had great feedback and ideas- and they were excited at the prospect of having a new medium in which they could publicize their programs, events and successes.
That widespread support made it easier to take the idea to our executive committee. I think they were excited about the chance to be at the forefront of this new medium. In April 2005, very few schools were podcasting, and none were doing it the way we envisioned doing it. I think the amount of press we’ve received since the launch of the podcast has also helped support their decision to give us the go-ahead to take this on.
3) What kind of traffic and feedback have you observed? In your opinion, does iTunes make a big difference traffic-wise?
In 2005, we served over 30,000 podcasts to listeners around the world. We didn’t have a set goal when we started in terms of the number of downloads or listeners. There wasn’t much in the way of empirical data available about the number of listeners in those pre-iTunes days. To be honest, I was hoping that I wasn’t going to be the only listener. Luckily, people have found it informative and they have subscribed to our feed, which is great. Now that we have a baseline, we’ll be able to set some expectations for 2006 and hopefully we’ll continue to be successful.
iTunes has been instrumental in our success. We were lucky enough to be in the iTunes Music Store podcast directory when it launched, and we saw a dramatic rise in downloads as well as subscriptions via iTunes. Now, it’s the number one way people find, subscribe and listen to our podcasts.
I think iTunes has brought podcasting into the mainstream. It made the process of finding and subscribing to podcasts very simple. One of the big keys to their success was the fact that millions of people already had the iTunes software and knew how to navigate and use the iTunes Music Store, so it was a genius move on Apple’s part to marry the two together. Thank you, Apple.
4) How do you produce your podcasts? Can you tell me a bit more about how you planned and produced your podcasts? What kind of budget did it take?
I think we’ve got it down to a science now in terms of production.
The first thing we do is pick a topic and schedule an interview with a student, faculty member or administrative employee. Sometimes we’ll search someone out and sometimes people will come to us with an idea. Before they come, I’ll ask them to think about some topics they would like to cover so I know in what directions to take the conversation.
When they’re here in our office, we record all the interviews directly into Apple’s GarageBand software. It’s very easy to use and can record multiple tracks at once, which is nice. Once the interviews are completed, we’ll record an introduction and a closing, then edit everything together, including bumper music produced by myself and our students.
Once it’s together, we export the podcast directly into iTunes, where we add the ID3 tags, including album art, and convert it to an mp3 file.
Once that’s completed we use an online tool built in-house by our students to upload and tag the podcast, and the world starts downloading them. It’s interesting to see the spike in traffic each week when we post a new episode.
One suggestion I would make is to involve students in the production each week. Our web development student workers have been very involved in all aspects of the production, including setup, recording and editing the podcast. It’s good experience for them and can also help with the workload if just one person is writing, editing and producing the podcast, as we do here at Allegheny.
As for cost, we’ve spent $500 on audio equipment to record the podcasts, including microphones, a small mixer and a USB audio interface and preamp.
5) How do you promote your podcasts?
We’ve promoted it a few ways. We’ve put graphic buttons on our college home page, our alumni site and our intranet home page. It’s also been promoted on podcasting news sites and blogs around the world. It’s been neat to see blog posts in Korea and the Netherlands talking about our podcast.
We’ve also noted in our press releases online that a podcast is available relating to a certain event. We’ll also be promoting them on our Orientation website, as we have several great podcasts about coming to campus archived from last year.
6) What advice can you give to your colleagues in other institutions who would like to try?
I’d encourage them to start podcasting–it’s a new, exciting and very cost-effective way to reach out and engage multiple audiences. I’d also recommend getting buy-in from key stakeholders and keeping them involved in the planning and production of the podcasts.
What’s interesting is that the medium of podcasting is still in its infancy. There are new technologies coming along all the time,
like videocasting/vodcasting, and it will be interesting to see how those affect the way institutions of higher education market themselves and integrate these services.