From working with hundreds of Storyboard organizations, we have seen many different approaches to private podcasts find success. With that said, many of our clients like to hear about success stories as they get started and define their own vision for internal podcasts.
While there are many creative approaches to your content, we’d like to highlight several themes that we have seen emerge as potential starting points for your podcast effort. Please remember though: you don’t have to choose only one strategy. With Storyboard, you have unlimited hosting and can build out multiple strategies as your podcast efforts evolve.
The “Employee Interview” approach looks like something of a bottom-up strategy. Existing channels, like email, video, and e-Learnings often do not provide much of a space to highlight the efforts of fantastic employees.
Podcasts are a stellar medium for doing this. In this strategy, a company usually finds one or two excellent hosts who will interview employees from across the organization or a specific department. For instance, a Sales team might bring on top performers from across the country for 20-30 minute interviews which showcase what makes the seller so successful. It’s a personal and engaging way to profile a company’s employees and drive team culture.
Many companies already have an approach for executives to share their larger vision. The problem: it’s often difficult to drive engagement around these messages, whether it’s in a “town hall” that can be disruptive to a schedule or in a conference call that does not feel personal.
With podcasting, executives can create a more tailored and engaging approach with virtual town halls. These might include having an interviewer record and ask questions to make the content conversational and interesting. Furthermore, your team will benefit from being able to download these key messages and listen on the go through the Storyboard app.
The training and knowledge development opportunities with Storyboard are tremendous. Many of our most successful podcasters may focus on remote or distributed teams, like a pharmaceutical company with sellers spread across the country.
In this instance, your employees are likely spending a significant portion of their day commuting to visit clients (and may be listening to their own podcasts already while on the road). Private podcasting is a great solution to help those employees, as they will not be tied to their desktop to complete key trainings.
On Storyboard, you can use our Groups functionality (available in our Pro Tier packages) to create podcast series organized around different topics or trainings. Additionally, on our Storyboard Pro product, you’ll be able to get engagement reports to understand completion rates and engagement with your trainings.
It’s no secret that most organizations may battle the overflow of information to their employees. A trend in the traditional podcasting world focuses on short-form (such as five to ten minute) updates on a specific topic. These easily accessible podcast episodes are compelling when they can help meaningfully improve the ability of employees to get key information.
Storyboard podcasters have built on this approach in a number of ways, like summarizing an hour-long town hall in a short-form format for those who missed it or launch a series focusing on industry news each week. While these episodes do not have to be daily (they may even be a weekly or bi-weekly cadence), the thing that makes them so effective is that they make it easy for your employees to consume content on the go.
On the Storyboard Pro packages, you will have access to our Groups feature, which allows an organization to deliver multiple channels or “groups” of podcast shows.
Many of our clients choose to evolve their internal communications with department-focused or job-focused podcast series, and Groups offers a vehicle for doing just that. In addition to publishing a show for an entire organization (like the “virtual Town Hall” referenced above), an organization might also launch a monthly podcast for the Billing Department or Marketing Team. For your listeners, they can subscribe to these groups and then receive a curated, customized podcast feed with relevant information for their team.
