Tonight I posted the following entry on the podcastpickle forum, and I feel like it's important enough to cross-post here.  The podcastpickle is an active community of podcast producers and listeners.  There's been a recent discussion about the role of nonprofits in podcasting and this was my response:

 I’m excited to hear more people chime in about the importance of giving nonprofits a voice in the podcasting world.  I’ve talked to a lot of you before and I think we all see eye-to-eye on what podcasting has to offer in the way that nonprofit organizations communicate with (and recruit new) constituents.

I’m going to repeat some points that have already been made, but also try to summarize the scope of why I think this discussion is important:

• Working for social change is inherently a story telling career.  Those of us who want to make the world a better place do so by telling the stories of our organizations and the lives we are improving.  Podcasting is a GREAT medium for this because you can hear the voices of the people telling the story.
• I believe that audio podcast are going to be preferable over blogs and video podcasts for 2 reasons: 1) they are more personable than text and they give more of a sense of “liveness” 2) they don’t require as many technical resources and know-how as video, making the adoption in the podcasting world more feasible.
• Don’t get me wrong; podcasting is not THE solution to all woes of nonprofit organizations.  This is just another important part of the puzzle that is going to give nonprofits a voice in our communities.

Ok, so assuming that I’m preaching to the choir, where do we go from here?  It sounds like several of us are interested in getting a network of nonprofit podcasters together.  I think this is a great idea and you can count me in to carry a load, but I think we need to be careful not to ignore the networks that already exist that may serve our needs.  For example:

• There is some awesome stuff going on over at Net2: http://netsquared.org/ a project of TechSoup and CompuMentor.  This community is totally supportive on new technology and already tapped into podcasting.  I’m planning on cross posting some of these thoughts there tonight.
• If we do go the route of creating a separate “network” of nonprofit podcasters, do we run the risk of alienating ourselves from the mainstream podcasting community?  Maybe we should talk more about how to give charities a louder voice in the podcasting world rather than how to set ourselves apart from the rest of it?
• Lets think about what listeners are looking for.  Do people really want to subscribe to nonprofit podcasts?  I think the strong supporters of organizations would certainly appreciate a dedicated channel to get the news about their beneficiaries, but will the general public subscribe?  I don’t think we can realistically expect DSC numbers if we are going to truly focus on nonprofit issues.
• The nptech tag that has been used by many nonprofit bloggers and social taggers is another great tool that is active and successful a tying nonprofit supporters together.  Maybe we can adopt this folksonomy as a way to tie us together?  Check out: http://www.technorati.com/tags/nptech for some details.

I could go on, but I think I’m already running the risk of rambling.  Lets get more talk about how we can make sure podcasting is working for np organizations!  Why don’t we start with a Skype conference or IM chat?  Other suggestions?

You can find the details of this discussion at: http://www.podcastpickle.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4307   I’d love to see some of the Net2 community add thoughts to the discussion on that forum and hope that some of the people involved there will check out the community here too.