Lynnewood Corridor, a Gilded Age mansion, stands close to the northwest fringe of my hometown. For many years, this Neoclassical revival behemoth sat surrounded by acres of untamed flora, inciting rumors, dares, and concrete myths. Throughout the previous yr, a basis purchased the constructing and began restoration efforts. As quickly as I learn the Inquirer headline, I believed, “I need to make a podcast about it.”
This restoration mission has so many angles that producing a podcast about it will be a full-time job. I already work full-time. If I commit the effort and time to the podcast that the Lynnewood restoration deserves, I have to be positive I do know why I’m doing it earlier than I begin.
When launching a podcast, individuals usually focus a lot on the technical aspect of issues that they overlook to reply the “Why?” query. Often, podcasters get an thought and begin looking for microphones. What podcasters want within the early phases, although, is the precise motivation.
Defining your podcast goal will help you maintain your enthusiasm, preserve a constant workflow, and join with the precise viewers in your present. Some motivations will help you and your present thrive, whereas others might drain you. Over the next paragraphs, we’ll focus on the general public and private functions for making a podcast and the way they match collectively to create a significant expertise.
Your Podcast’s Public Goal
Your podcast’s public causes (ambitions you’d admit in a job interview or to a possible investor) don’t require a lot clarification. These causes might overlap, however that’s okay. Utilizing Lynnewood Hall for example, I’ll present you 5 easy causes to make a podcast first. Later, we’ll speak about private causes: they’ve extra advanced causes however fruitful outcomes.
1. Advertising
Once you make a podcast to advertise a enterprise and promote services or products, the podcast’s goal will be summed up in a single phrase: advertising and marketing.
Your podcast can promote reductions or new merchandise, study points germane to what you are promoting in larger element, and invite clients to really feel that what you are promoting is for individuals like them. There are a great deal of great brand podcasts to function examples. Within the case of Lynnewood Corridor, a podcast may clarify the restoration plan, its monetary prices and group advantages, and promote fundraising efforts.
2. Artistic Outlet
In the event you’re captivated with storytelling and sound design, podcasting will be the right inventive outlet. You’ll be able to experiment with narrative types and enhancing, and discover an viewers with fewer obstacles than you’d with radio, theatre or movie.
Lynnewood Corridor’s historical past affords inventive challenges for fiction podcasters or native theatre corporations, to create audio drama based mostly on tales from the mansion’s historical past. With the precise writers and administrators, this podcast may discover conflicts at school, gender, and race which can be nonetheless related immediately. Followers of HBO’s The Gilded Age or ITV’s Downton Abbey would discover their itch for historic drama properly scratched.
How do you share concepts, host get-togethers, and promote change? Very similar to attending a weekly spiritual service, podcasts are a recurring message that allows you to appeal to and converse with different like-minded souls.
Lynnewood Corridor has attracted optimistic and unfavourable consideration for over 100 and twenty-five years. With out good messaging, this effort may appeal to individuals who really feel the cash is best spent on reasonably priced housing, and the land can be higher used as public inexperienced area. However, with a community-focused podcast, the mansion may appeal to volunteers for cleanup efforts, fundraisers, and academic applications.
Within the case of Lynnewood Corridor, the muse acknowledges that this property doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They use their Patreon web page to point out footage and articles about close by historical past celebrations or contemporaneous buildings. A podcast may improve these relationships and present the connection to native residents whereas producing curiosity for future applications.
4. Training
Instructing others how you can do belongings you’re an professional in will be exhilarating.
In its heyday, sustaining Lynnewood Corridor would have required sufficient individuals to populate a city, all earlier than electrical energy and indoor plumbing had been the norm. Lynnewood Corridor’s restoration mission is a dwelling alternative to show carpentry, crafts, structure, gardening, soil preservation, and, in flip, sustainability.
5. Leisure
Why not have some enjoyable? Audiences need it: comedy is the highest class in practically each podcast chart. Your podcast could make individuals really feel good and escape their day by day drudgery.
As I mentioned earlier once we talked about how a podcast’s goal generally is a inventive outlet, there will be loads of enjoyable in a podcast about Lynnewood Corridor. For instance, a historical past quiz present may have company who’re native lecturers or historical past buffs. A respectful workforce of comedian improvisers may invent comedy sketches based mostly on the mansion’s historical past. And also you simply know that each particular person engaged on the preservation mission has not less than one joke in regards to the day by day challenges restoring an previous constructing presents.
Autonomy, Mastery, & Purpose
Daniel Pink is a author who has studied motivation for many of his life. Because the speechwriter to former Vice President Al Gore, Pink wanted to have the ability to write, typically on a second’s discover, talks that might persuade anybody. His e-book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, “attracts on 50 years of behavioral science to problem conventional beliefs about human motivation.” What he discovered has been the topic of animated video shorts, TED talks, and extra. Finally, Pink argues that most individuals are motivated by the need for autonomy, mastery, and goal.
Right here’s how podcasting makes probably the most of those three qualities:
Autonomy
You’re the boss. The work is self-directed, and also you set your personal schedule.
Mastery
Podcasters problem themselves by studying new abilities and gaining data and understanding. Not solely does mastery present long-term achieve from proficiency, however accomplishment additionally provides your mind an endorphin blast within the quick time period.
Goal
When your podcast impacts different individuals, issues, or occasions exterior your sphere, it’s gratifying. Think about that your podcast raised funds for a mission you care about, enhanced volunteer dog-walking at animal shelters, or received a thousand individuals to all put on the identical shade on Wednesdays. How wouldn’t it really feel? Fairly spiffy, proper?
As Pink wrote in Drive, “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
Find Your Personal Purpose to Know Your Podcast’s Purpose
Peter A.B. Widener commissioned Lynnewood Hall’s construction out of steel, limestone, and marble to weather decades. The Widener family residence was also a home for their carefully curated art collection, including works by Gainsborough, Degas, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Raphael, El Greco, Titian, Donatello, Monet, and Sargent.
This collection was open to the public from October through June, a habit few people of their peer group would practice. After the Widener family’s eldest son, George, and his 17-year-old son Harry, perished on the Titanic in 1912, Peter A.B. Widener’s health failed. Subsequently, the Widener family divested themselves of their treasures. They donated the art collection to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and used their wealth to fund a school for disabled children, libraries, public art installations, and Widener University.
Peter A.B. Widener II later wrote, “I am convinced that happiness, real joy in living, does not lie in possessions. It is to be found only in slaving with all one’s mind and imagination and physical strength for a worthwhile objective.” Their love of people far outweighed their possessions and acreage.
What do you love so much that you could talk about it for hours every week to strangers?
What are you so interested in that you’d feel compelled to share it even when you’re tired, or you need to put dinner on the table, or things just aren’t going well?
What can you afford to be generous with? Podcasting isn’t hard, but producing a good podcast isn’t simple. Be sure to know why you need to make a podcast, what you need it to do, and who it’s for. This fashion, even when your podcast doesn’t make you wealthy or well-known, your podcast’s goal will enrich your life from the within out.
In the event you’ve tried utilizing our Alitu Showplanner, you will have seen that the questions assist you determine why you need to make a podcast and who the podcast is for. In the event you haven’t tried the Showplanner but, you owe it to your self to offer it a whirl. It’s a free instrument that may make it easier to take the primary steps in planning a podcast you’ll be able to maintain persistently for a very long time.
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