“Let’s do an employee volunteering podcast!”
I said to my colleague Martyna. She was clearly a lot less enthusiastic about this idea than I was.
“How hard could it be?“
My organisation, non-profit social enterprise Works4U is an employee volunteering specialist and as well as impactful delivery of volunteering projects and programmes we are leading the UK in developing good practice to increase the level and impact of corporate volunteering that takes place. Doing a podcast very much fits with this role, but …
“Just what the world needs is another podcast”
Everyone it seems is doing a podcast, is another one needed? A podcast on volunteering is quite niche but one on employee volunteering is extremely niche.
Well, I can say with absolute conviction that yes, an employee volunteering podcast is needed. In fact, the more you look at the topic, the more you realise it is an area that is not talked about enough.
It is estimated that employer supported volunteering (ESV) contributes about £1 billion of economic benefit to the UK each year, but no one is talking about it? Think about that for a moment… when have you ever heard of anything that contributes £1 billion but it’s not really discussed? In any other area of society, this would have huge focus and deeply analysed and be reported on?
Employee volunteering is growing in the UK but we are still nowhere near maximising the potential of this activity. There is no infrastructure for employee volunteering, no accepted good practice or metrics and the participants from the different sectors seem to use different language and terminology.
Therefore it is very relevant and with a lot of pride I can say we launched ‘DAYS LIKE THESE‘ the employee volunteering video podcast a week ago with 4 launch episodes, each interviewing someone from a particular aspect or involvement in employee volunteering:
– Lisa Quinn from broker Team UP (Volunteer Centre Camden)
– Paula Glover who is a doing a PhD in employer supported volunteering
– Matt Hobbs who has been developing an employee volunteering programme at the SME he works for over the past 3 years
– Alex Lander who is part of charity committee at her finance business where they organise employee volunteering
These podcasts are freely available to watch or listen on the following platforms:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple (audio only)
Amazon Music (audio only)
I hope that sounds a tiny bit impressive? Particularly as I have never produced a podcast before, never used or edited with podcast software or tried to publish before to Spotify, Apple or Amazon. These were all new skills and experiences.
Although I could have done it alone, I was keen to have my colleague Martyna to co-host to give balance and different perspectives to the podcast. Martyna already works extremely hard delivering brilliant employee volunteering projects and recording podcasts is not in her job description. She was quite sceptical at first but I said let’s go with this one step at a time and if she decided at any point she did not want to do it, she could pull out, no problem.
I did some research and decided on using the Riverside podcasting platform as that seemed good value for money and covered the functionality we needed. Martyna and I then started practicing, using our weekly catch ups to get used to the software.
We also needed a name for the podcast, we needed a logo, graphics/animation to look professional as well sounds and music. I chose ‘DAYS LIKE THESE‘ as when working with business clients it is often talked about using up employee volunteering days, organising days etc.
We also needed to get people to agree to be interviewed and people are busy and even if the podcast is very niche they have their professional reputations to think of. Also, we know that some businesses and employers will be very sensitive to being talked about so we made the decision to invite individuals to our podcast rather than representatives of a particular organisation. That way the individual can decide what is appropriate to mention and discuss. Also, we do not record as a live stream and so send an edit to the person before we publish so if something was said that perhaps would be best not to be broadcast we can edit it out.
In one of the interviews, my internet, for the first time in several years, completely and totally crashed and as I was logged into the platform as the producer I was worried that we would lose everything, but no, we were able to get back going and you absolutely cannot tell which of these podcasts this happened on.
So, how hard is it to create an employee volunteering podcast? It’s quite involved and takes a long time to get set up but now we are off and running it will be relatively straight forward for us to release an interview each month.
If you know someone who would be a good interviewee or if you would like to be interviewed then please get in touch, either through this blog or direct to Works4U: enquiries@works-4u.com
A huge thank you to everyone who has been involved in making this happen, especially my sceptical co-host Martyna Bielecka 🙂
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