Podcasting Essentials: Audio Production for Social Change

For creators and organisations who are looking to amplify their message and expand their reach, podcasting is quickly becoming one of the best ways to communicate with your audience. Audio is a portable, accessible, and convenient means for listeners to engage with your content throughout their daily activities. Podcasts provide a powerful way to bring stories to life, engage with diverse guests and introduce new perspectives.  

At RNW Media, we believe that podcasting can help inform and surprise your listeners as well as drive them to social change. But in order to craft powerful audio stories and capture your audience’s attention, you will need to hone your production and narrative skills.   

Our training enables you to understand the medium of podcasting and master the basics of audio production. We highlight the unique strengths and challenges of podcasting as well as how to maximise its potential to best engage with your audience. We also provide tools and techniques that can help turn your message into immersive, compelling episodes.   

This training covers the key aspects of bringing your podcast to life: from scripting to recording to publishing - and everything in between! The training is hands-on, and participants are encouraged to both brainstorm and develop their podcast idea but also record and edit a sound bite/short podcast.  

After completing this training, you will be able to:

• Analyse the podcasting landscape and trends  
• Identify different podcast formats, genres, and narratives  
• Write for the ear and successfully structure audio content 
• Discern best practices for podcasting and review effective case studies 
• Record and edit high-quality audio  

Planning: During the planning phase, you will answer the key questions: why, who, and what. These questions will provide a strong foundation to start your podcast!

Scripting: Scripting is about moving from a plan to a blueprint. You will define storytelling elements, style and tone of voice, duration, and other relevant elements!

Recording: Recording is all about practice! We will share some useful tips about voice and other relevant tools like interviewing. 

Editing: Editing is all about timing and flow, especially when it comes to sound. We will go over basic principles of editing, introduce a free software for editing, and share some tips!

Publishing: Preparing your creation to be shared with the world, using the right strategies!

Distributing: Our final step is about considering where to distribute your final result, we will share some useful tips!