Podcasts?

Does anyone here have any experience with setting up podcasts within their nonprofit? I know nothing about it, and we are hoping to tackle the project in 2008. We have existing content in mp3 format that we can use, but that's about all I've got to go on.

I looked at some older TechSoup community conversations but they were pretty old and a lot of the links to helpful resources were broken, or pointed to resources that were not up to date.

Any help anyone can lend would be fabulous!

We had a great session about podcasting at the 2007 NTC that covered all the basics.

Materials from the session are here:
http://www.themshow.com/ntc

A nice summary of the session can be found here:
http://www.citidc.com/doc/whitepapers/CITI_AudioPodcasting.pdf

Hope that helps!

A couple of other good resources:

Podcasting 101

Podcamp resource list

Publishing a podcast wasn't too difficult for us, since we were using Joomla framework. It was just matter of installing an extension to handle podcasts. (so, I'd imagine there's a wide variety of answers for how to publish a podcast - just as there is a wide variety of ways to record audio and generate an MP3...)

Another tool to consider as you set up podcasting...

http://www.feedburner.com

It allows you to track who has subscribed to your podcast, and you can generate an HTML button for your site to make it easy for people to subscribe (with a wide variety of podcast clients including iTunes).

I'd be happy to talk with you about how to start your podcast. The basic steps are: 1. Decide how your podcast meets your organization's goals. 2. Decide what kind of content to include in your podcast (i.e. interviews, news, talks). 3. Decide how often you want to post, 4. Create the content (there are a variety of digital recording devices out there. 5. Edit it with a program like Audacity or Garageband. 6. Post it on your hosting service. I recommend Libsyn. 7. After you've posted a few shows, list your podcast on the iTunes Music Store and other podcast directories. Feel free to contact me for more info.