Before flying from Oakland to Washington DC for NTEN's Nonprofit Technology Conference last week, I bought carbon offsets for my flight from TerraPass, and in the process signed up for their blog, TerraBlog.

In mid-February, they asked readers to fill out a survey to help them determine whether or not to start a podcast. At the beginning of April they posted the results, which were pretty interesting:

• • 55% of survey respondents claimed to listen to podcasts. Given that more people who listen to podcasts were likely to respond to the survey than people who don't listen, they have launched a follow up poll to check the results. When I looked today, 34% of poll respondents said that they listen to podcasts and 66% said they don't.
• • The optimum length for a podcast was 5-10 minutes.
• • More people preferred long content (10 minutes or more) to short content (less than three minutes).
• • People want regular updates, but not too regular — about once a week.
• • Content should be a mix of light and heavy
• • Practical tips, product reviews, and interviews with experts were in demand.

Even more interesting are the comments on the post which indicate that many people listen to podcasts while they are doing something else--driving, working, exercising, which isn't that surprising, but something to keep in mind when you think about your podcast's audience.

I was surprised by how many people said that they like podcasts specifically for that reason, they can listen to them while doing something else, which they can't do when reading a blog.

Although TerraPass is a business, rather than a nonprofit, my guess is that a lot of their results woud apply to many nonprofit listeners. Even better, I like their approach of asking TerraPass supporters if a podcast is something they want, what kind of content interests them, and what length they prefer.