Full Circle Associates

Steven Buckley of Christian Aid – London recently posted to the KM4Dev mailing list about some work they are doing with podcasting in development. I have been hankering to stimulate some conversation, learning and action about this in the group, but haven't had time, so I was happy to see Steven's post. He gave me permission to reproduce it here for my NGO/NPO friends who are wondering, "why podcast?"

Podcast from Haiti (audio/mpeg Object)

Other Christian Aid Podcasts

Following on from my posting earlier this year on blogging, we’ve now started some serious work at Christian Aid on podcasting. Given the (fairly) recent threads on his subject, I thought I’d share our experiences.

Christian Aid podcasts are made available to staff through the intranet and to the public through iTunes and feedburner. Staff are alerted to new podcasts through a dynamic HTML listing of podcast feeds, though the file is hosted internally. We also take a lot of effort to promote the podcasts internally (screenshot of Intranet home page for this week is attached).

As with the blogs, we’ve found staff and supporters have engaged with the format very quickly. We now get emails asking if an event will have an associated podcast.

For the first couple of months, we focussed on using podcasts to get internal information to staff based outside the UK. This week we’re trying a daily podcast from Haiti in the Carribean to look at the issues our partners and beneficiaries face. It’s taking a fair amount of time to produce but the feedback has been tremendous – from supporters who are hearing stories from trips as they take place and for our field office staff who are able to get their perspectives out to the rest of the organisation.

You can listen to episode 3 – due on iTunes tomorrow - here on the web: http://nightingalesangatwcc.typepad.com/podcast/files/haiti_day_1.mp3 (Nancy's note: CA has also been using blogging to share their message.)

If you use iTunes, you can subscribe to the podcast here:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=161661341

Or with any other podcatcher here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/christianaidpodcasts

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of the project:

Field recording are made using a Maycom HandHeld field recorder

Edit recordings are made on the editing PC (yes, a better mic is needed)

The WAV files are edited using open source software from Audacity

The MP3 file is created using Audacity and LAME

The file is hosted on a blogging site – we use Typepad – and on our internal intranet

The feed is sent to Feedburner, which also submits the iTunes feed for us.

Hope this is of interest. As ever, drop me a line with any questions / comments.

All the best,

Steven Buckley
Christian Aid – London