At a Glance

Client: Community Housing Cymru

Service: ‘Podcast 101’ training and consultancy

The Background

Community Housing Cymru represents all housing associations in Wales. Its members provide traditional as well as specialist social housing for around 10% of the Welsh population.

Community Housing Cymru approached Bengo Media to help them create a podcast that would address the issues affecting social housing, as well as illustrate that the sector is far more than just bricks and mortar.

The team at Community Housing Cymru had long term ambitions to manage the podcast in-house.

The Brief

• Most of the Community Housing Cymru team were already active podcast listeners, but none of them knew how to create, edit or publish one from scratch.
• The podcast would need to introduce the issues facing the housing sector to a wider audience, not simply appeal to those already within the sector.
• Bengo Media would work with Community Housing Cymru on the production of the first couple of podcast episodes, with the in-house team shadowing the process.
• The Community Housing Cymru team would need to feel confident enough to plan, script, record, edit and publish all future episodes in-house.

What we did

• We worked with Community Housing Cymru to flesh out their ideas, advising on length, tone, format, and a target list of potential podcast guests from outside of the housing sector.
• We held training sessions with the core team who would be responsible for recording, editing and publishing the podcast in the future.
• We introduced Community Housing Wales to free software which they could use to create branded podcast artwork for iTunes and other players, as well as associated mini-films to help promote each episode on social media.
• We acted as an on-going, on-call support service, troubleshooting any podcasting issues encountered quickly and easily.

Feedback

Rebecca Goodhand, Marketing and Communications Manager at Community Housing Cymru, said:

“Our work with Bengo Media started with a training session, which our policy team were engaged in too. Knowing that we weren’t very ‘tech-savvy’ the information was given to us in digestible chunks; these were pitched just right and helped everyone to feel comfortable.

Since launching the podcast and subsequently taking the production in house, Steve has also been on hand to help us when any technical questions come up, which is really reassuring.

We’re pleased with how the podcast has been received so far. It has been great for re- engaging people from across the business in the issues that are a daily part of the job. Also, because a different member of staff features in each episode, people are really interested to see the stats and how well each one performs. Most importantly, we’ve also attracted listeners from outside the sector, which is brilliant as that was one of our original goals for the project.

We’ve since invited Bengo Media to speak at the annual communications festival which we organise for the whole sector, and we wouldn’t hesitate to work with them again.”

Listen to “Around The Houses” on Spreaker.

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