Cheryl Broom (00:00.142)
Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications. I've had a podcast now for gosh going on two years, and I absolutely love it. It's a great time. I love having guests on. I love discussing really exciting community college and higher education themes with some really smart people. And in this

Podcast, I had a lot of fun kind of dissecting the ins and outs of creating your own podcast. In this week's podcast, I have on Lauren and Christopher from Alan Hancock College, who were challenged to start a podcast with their college president as its host. They talked through how they came to understand how podcasting works, identified a theme and a format, created a brand around the podcast, chose their equipment.

equipment and then gone out there and really made a success for their college and for their college president. Any of you who are interested in starting a podcast on your campus need to listen to this. They really did it the right way and are just really doing a great job at keeping it going and keeping it fresh. I learned a lot about how to be a better podcaster myself and I think you're gonna learn a lot as well.

Well, thank you both so much for being here today. I'm really excited to have you. So why don't we start off by having you each introduce yourself, tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do for the college. So Lauren, I'll have you start. Sure. So I'm Lauren Melbourne. I am the Director of Public Affairs and Communications here at Allen Hancock College.

So what that means is I oversee all of the marketing, branding, public information for the college. I have a team of public affairs specialists here. And then I also oversee our campus graphics department. Wonderful. Thank you, Lauren and Chris. Hi, I'm Chris McGuinness. I'm a public information analyst. So I work for Lauren and

Cheryl Broom (02:10.092)
I do kind of a little bit of everything. I do the college of social media, write copy and also help out on producing our podcast. And I love having Chris on the podcast because he's got the professional microphone and the amazing earphones, which I don't have yet. So I that reminds me I need to get some of those. so yeah, you're looking good and sounding good. Thanks. Yeah, I I love anything that allows me to accumulate.

gadgets. so this is kind of the perfect thing for that. If you like if you like collecting gadgets, this is this is a great thing to get into. Well you're gonna need to outfit Lauren because I don't see any focus. Okay. So tell me a little bit about the Alan Hancock podcast. What what is it? Who's your audience? What is it called? Let's just start off with the very basics of of what exactly you're doing.

Sure. So we have our Alan Hancock College podcast. It is called Hancock Conversations. And so what it is, is it's really a setting for our superintendent president to sit down and have conversations with a guest or maybe multiple guests. So when we decided to look into launching a podcast, the real goal was to provide a space where

He could have these less formal conversations. So we have all these channels to get information out there to the community, to the public, to the internal college campus, obviously emails or social media and all this stuff. But we wanted something where people could kind of get to know him a little bit better. He's a very conversational person, a very friendly guy.

and so this medium really works well for him to to just have these back and forths with folks. And we try to choose guests who either range from you know the president of our board of trustees all the way down to you know an alumni who is now working in the community and everyone in between. Chris, I don't know if you want to add some some more to that.

Cheryl Broom (04:19.852)
Yeah, I would just say that, you know, Lauren's right. It it was really a great way to not only highlight, you know, our superintendent president, but to highlight the people and the stories on our campus. You know, one of the things about what we do is we get to meet all these great people from all these different departments and from the community who have these great stories that are connected to our college. And so this podcast really became a great forum to tell those stories to really show people kind of the rich experience that.

all these people connected to our campus have. And and because our superintendent president is is a really great interviewer, very personable, he was really able to bring those stories out, let those people tell their stories in a in a really inspiring and impactful way. I think, you know, Lauren, when you were talking about your job and your job title and your duties and Chris, you too, like you all do so much. And I think a lot of colleges, you know, might want to do something like a podcast, but don't know how to fit that into their

schedule like how did you make that work as because it's a pretty you know big undertaking at least to get started. How did you make it work and why was it a priority for your department? The podcast really came about really because the college did a survey on communications and it was found that especially the internal population wanted to be hearing more from our president.

So the idea was suggested of, well, maybe he can have a social media account for himself. The college has really strong social media accounts already established. So we felt that that might not be the wisest and most efficient way forward to get some more communication from him. So we had the idea of what about a podcast? That might be a new way that we can we can do something like that for him.

So the priority was really established because the president wanted something to help him communicate. So that was a really good way to push us forward and make sure it wasn't some idea that never, never took form and just kind of got brushed away because we get so busy. I love that you made that decision after research. The big boss was like, okay, clearly I need to do something.

Cheryl Broom (06:36.326)
I'll never forget I was at an NCMPR conference when I was PIO and I was listening to Andrea Hanstein, who's now at the state chancellor's office, give a talk about having her college president on social media. He had his own account. And I got really excited and I texted my college president and I was like, hey, Francisco, you we need to get you an Instagram account. And he wrote back, he's like, This is why I never want to approve you going to any conferences.

But I think the takeaway was like he didn't have time to be on Instagram all the time. And I think this podcast is such a great idea because I envision that you and your department have a lot of control over it. And you probably do most of the scheduling and he just has to show up. Exactly. Exactly. So once once we floated the idea of a podcast versus a social media account with him, and he liked it and signed on to the concept.

Then we really got to work on sitting down and figuring out, okay, what is this really gonna look like? because we had no podcast equipment. we had never done a podcast. so we really started from the ground up. So it was basically Chris and myself and one other person here who has a studio. He's our photographer and videographer. And so he has a studio with some audio equipment.

And we saw opportunity with his studio of how can we expand that and create a recording studio for something like this. So we got to work on researching equipment. We definitely got to work on who who are our guests going to be, what is this podcast really going to look like? What is the flow of the podcast gonna look like? Are we gonna heavily edit it? Is it gonna be more natural?

So those kind of conversations started happening immediately in some brainstorming sessions. Chris, I don't know if you want to add a little bit to that. Yeah, you know, we we did spend quite a bit of time just kind of talking about and conceptualizing what the podcast was going to be, what format it was. And I think that that time was spent really well because, you know, if you listen to podcasts, there's a lot of different kinds of formats. There's, you know, very formal ones that are very highly produced. There's ones that are are very casual. And so

Cheryl Broom (08:55.212)
We really sat down and thought about, okay, what's our goal with this podcast? Who are we trying to reach? What kind of feel do we want? And kind of built out how it would work from there. And I think taking the time to really think about what the podcast was and what we wanted it to be really helped us move forward with actually, you know, executing it and and figuring out how we were going to create something and record something regularly and fit everything we needed into it.

So you've done like two of my favorite things so far. You started with research and then you made a plan. So I think those are two really good takeaways for the audience is this isn't something you just want to dive into. Yeah. And and that's a that's a great point because I think so many of us get caught in that knee-jerk reaction of like the president wants me to do something. I gotta just quick execute it.

And this was something that we knew if we were going to do it right, we needed to make sure we took the time to do it right. And that was one of actually the probably the biggest challenges really was setting that expectation for our president, especially, of how much time it will take to do this and to do it right. It did not happen as quickly as maybe he would have wanted it to happen or launched as quickly as he wanted, but

We just knew that we really needed to put in the work up front to make sure that the product once we launched it was successful and well received. So, how did you end up formatting it? What is the podcast like? It basically is an introduction. The president does an introduction, welcomes the guests to the podcast, and we give him a set of questions to get the conversation rolling.

Again, our president, because he's such a personable guy, he usually will start with those questions and then just the conversation continues organically. So it's just really a back and forth between the two. And and then we do like to wrap it up with rapid-fire questions at the end, just some silly things like what's your favorite ice cream? Or, you know, if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? Just something to get them to lighten the mood at the end of it and maybe get some laughs and.

Cheryl Broom (11:14.752)
some friendly banter back and forth. I love that idea. That's such a great idea. I'm gonna write that down. Rapid fire questions. Yeah, it's fun. So, what's the length of each podcast and how frequently is he recording them? So each podcast is anywhere, I would say, from about 15 to 30 minutes. they usually fall in right around half an hour. It sort of just depends on the guest. you know, we've had guests that

He knew really, really well. that went, you know, maybe closer to 45 minutes, but we usually try to edit them down to to around 30 minutes. We found that that was kind of a good, a good time to get people listening. That's great. Yeah, I've experimented with that with my own podcast. And usually 30 minutes seems to be kind of the gold standard of what people want to listen to with professional podcasts. Now, and I think if you're listening to like true crime.

Or hidden brain or one of the really popular ones that are super edited, the longer format is really interesting. But if it's just an interview, it does seem like that half an hour is kind of a sweet spot. Yeah. And that's and that's a really great thing about podcasts, is because the format can be so flexible, you can really look at what your needs are and tailor it to that instead of the other way around. you know, and I and I think for the kind of interviews that we were doing, and it again, it's very conversational, you know, when I would

talk to guests, I would let them know it's like, you it's kind of like sitting down and having a cup of coffee with them. And so for for that kind of thing, it just felt natural to do the half an hour. And and he as a host, he was very cognizant of of the time and and would kind of have a natural feel for when to start to bring things to a close or when he thought it was okay to kind of open a subject up more and keep it running for longer. So Chris, is it your job then to find the guests and to schedule them and to get them prepared?

you know, fighting guests is kind of a group effort. Me, Laura and even the president will suggest people. We kind of just keep a spreadsheet of of different people, whether we meet them through other projects we're doing, whether they're suggestions from the president or other folks. And what we did would do is I would usually try and contact them, book them for a time slot that worked for them and the president, and usually do a, you know, kind of a pre-interview, basically, where I talk to them a little bit about their story, try and get some background on them, basically enough to write these

Cheryl Broom (13:32.472)
kind of these background reports and some starting questions for the president. So that's where it would sort of start is contacting them, booking them, doing the pre-interview, and kind of doing this little write-up to have on the day of because you know the president will introduce them, give a little biography about them, and then jump into the questions. So again, it does have a little pre-work there, but it but it really helps to know who the guest is, give the president a sense of who the guest is if

He only knows them a little bit or or doesn't know their full story. It gives everyone a nice background to start from. And then the interview happens, and that's about at half an hour, but I'm sure you probably schedule like an hour for your president. And then who edits it afterwards? What happens once it's once it's recorded? So our photographer, videographer, does the editing. He has that equipment in his studio. So after the recording is done, he takes the file, he renders it, gets it all ready to go.

And then he gives the file to Chris and then Chris gets it uploaded. we have a podcast site on our website. Great. So let's realistically for college who's like, I love this idea. I want my president to have a podcast. Once you get that planning done, how much time do you think you're dedicating to each podcast?

You know, it it's it's it's difficult to say exactly because you know, we kind of fit doing this podcast work into our daily schedule. So it's broken up. when we first kind of conceived of the podcast, what we decided to do was actually pre-record a lot of episodes, kind of do them in these batches because we wanted to be able to release episodes regularly and to do that to try and record and do and have something ready, you know, we said we wanted to do it twice a month. So to be able to do that twice a month.

kind of on the fly was was not really realistic. So what we did was we gave ourselves some time to build up a sort of cachet of episodes. But I would say, you know, you know, between the the booking and the pre-interview is, you know, probably takes combines maybe an hour to do all that and write the guide. the actual recording is about an hour. You know, I think the editing maybe takes another hour or so, depending on the length of the podcast and how much editing there is. And I

Cheryl Broom (15:42.114)
No, Cheryl, you edit a podcast. So it really depends on the guests you get. Are there a lot of ums and ahs? Are there a lot of interruptions or did it flow naturally? You know, how heavily edited do you want things? But the good news is is as we did more episodes, obviously our photographer, videographer got very good at editing. So that kind of slimmed down. But I would say give yourself at least an hour or so. If you've never done it before and it's your first time, you will need more time because that is a very meticulous part of doing this.

And then, you know, once you had that, you know, we actually for ADA purposes transcribed these episodes. So we put them through an automatic transcriber, but we still had to have someone in our office read through it for accuracy and do that. So that takes time. So, you know, I would say from from start to finish for a full episode, if you're if you were to put it all together, you know, it would take, you know, three days. I mean, even the span of a week of just going through each part of that process. And that's again with we're lucky enough to have a small team.

we could split up some of that work. if you're just one person, it does take a lot of time and it is a it is a time commitment. And you know, we were able to make it a priority because it became our president superintendent's priority. We had buy-in from them and we had an understanding from them that this was something that we wanted to make happen and we wanted to do well. So we were able to dedicate that time. But we really had to fit a lot of that stuff into our schedule and make sure that it happened and that it was a priority and that it wasn't something that we would keep pushing back for other stuff.

There's so many good like tips that you just gave right there. First, I love the fact that you record in batches. That's such a great idea. I try to do that with my own podcast because guests cancel, people get sick, something comes up. And so that's a great tip is to get a couple in the bag so you're always ready to go. And then knowing that it's not just something you can record and boom get live is really important. It is a time commitment.

I used to edit my own podcast when I started this one because I I wasn't very busy at work. And then I had a guest who said, and I am not exaggerating like 500 times. And it took like three days to edit. And I said, I have to hire an editor. So I I hired an editor who now edits the podcast, and he's an expert in sound. So it has made my podcast so much better. So having a great editor that has time is really important as well.

Cheryl Broom (18:02.294)
And yeah, the transcripts are something that people overlook. You need to make sure it's accessible. And and even though there are services that will do it, you know, for a for a dollar, it's hysterical what they transcribe, how incorrect it is. So you do need to have a real person come back and read through them. So all really good tips. And Lauren, I saw that you had something I think you wanted to add as well. I was gonna

Touch on recording podcasts in batches. One thing that we found that worked really well for us is we worked with the admin assistant in the president's office and on scheduling the president because his schedule gets so busy. So if you're going to work with your president, you know, sometimes there's weeks where you barely ever even see them because they're so busy. So what we did is we worked with her and she would block out chunks of time, like two hour chunks of time on his calendar.

Like months in advance. So it would be held there and it would be, you know, maybe twice a week or every other week, whatever she could kind of fit in. And it would be held so then we could plan to those chunks of time. So if we didn't have anybody booked for a chunk of time, we'd let her know she'd release the time for him. If something came up for him, she would check in with us and we could try to work around that. So that really worked because at first it was.

You know, how are we going to schedule all this? Cause he's kind of a moving target with his busy schedule. So that that's a recommendation I would have if you're gonna try to do something with your president. Yeah, president's calendars are crazy. It's like lucky if you can get 10 minutes on there, let alone an hour. Right, exactly. So we just really worked ahead of time and and like I said, had things booked out within, you know, months.

So that we could plug people in and then you know our guests would know you're gonna be on in three weeks or a month or whatever was gonna work. And I bet your guests really feel special being on the podcast with the president as well, especially I'm assuming you have people who are on campus, or have you had students on or faculty? Yes. So we've had students, we've had upcoming graduates on, we've had alumni on, faculty on.

Cheryl Broom (20:16.61)
We've had community members come on as well, Board of Trustees, all kinds of people have been on our podcast at this point. One of the really cool episodes we have was last year we were celebrating our centennial, and we brought on a guest who was a graduate from gosh, I can't remember which class, but it was like in the 1950s. And it was just such a cool conversation to hear her talk talk about the college.

back then and tie it into our centennial. So we really try to find guests that not only have connections to the college, but have connections to what might be happening at the college during that time. And that's actually sparked an idea as you were talking is we do editorial calendars, you know, for social media, for press releases. And I'm sure doing an editorial calendar for podcasts would be another way to make sure

that certain topics are covered by the president that would be important to the college, like celebrations or social movements, you know, things that people would want to hear him address. Yeah, we do try to look at, you know, what's coming up, you know, what's important at the time. We also do try to be careful about not allowing the podcast to morph into.

kind of a megaphone for the for the president to speak on important issues. He does a really great job of that through forums or through his emails, through all kinds of other avenues. So, you know, we do try to make sure we we think about, you know, if it's we're a Hispanic serving institution and if it's a month celebrating something like that, we might bring on a guest to to talk about their heritage and things like that.

But we also don't want it to go down the road of being talking about policy and procedure and and stuff like that, which it could easily do. That's another thing we kind of talked about is, you know, timeliness. So because these podcast episodes are up for a long time and because we're recording them batches and releasing them later, we didn't want them to be too timely and topical. And that's something we looked at in the editing. We wanted them to kind of be able to stand on their own. So whenever you you come to them.

Cheryl Broom (22:31.864)
You're able to listen to them. And of course, you know, we put when it when they're recorded and and things like that. And when we had, you know, our first batch done, when we thought about when we would release them, we did look at upcoming events. So, you know, we had some podcasts with some of our student government folks and we ran those around the time we were doing commencement of that year. So there there was an element of that. But again, you know, you have to think about people are going to find these episodes, they're coming to these episodes out of context. They may even come to them out of order.

may listen to them halfway through. So if you're doing stuff that's really timely and topical, you know, make sure to give them that context because a lot of the time they're not coming and saying, all right, I'm gonna start with episode one and go, you know, go all the way through in order. That's something I do, but that's because I'm a big nerd. not everyone does that. so you want to make sure it's accessible no matter at what point that they're entering, you know, that that stream and listening to those episodes.

Yeah, that's a great point. I have a podcast series, a business development one that I really like to listen to. And they have like five hundred episodes. And when I walk the dog, I'll like scroll through and it might be from 2017, but I'm like, that one's interesting. And then all the ones on the pandemic, I'm like, I don't want to hear this. I'm so over this. I'm not listening to anything about the pandemic. So yeah, you do I think that's a great point is to make sure you have that context so listeners, you know, know what they're listening to and can pick.

And can pick the right episode. So now that you've got your podcast going, you've done it for a while, you have a clear process. How do you measure results? Are you interested in analytics? Is your president interested in knowing how many people listen? So we measure the analytics through our downloads. So as of in April, we might have some updated numbers, but we had 1,544 downloads.

we had five out of five stars on our Apple podcast. And we also the college recently did another survey of internal folks on communications and we were able to get our podcast on there to see how people felt about it. And it was rated quite high, which was wonderful news. So we know the superintendent he gets a lot of great feedback from folks saying that they listen and they love it and

Cheryl Broom (24:53.378)
He likes to joke that his mom is the only one who really listens, but we know there's more folks out there that are listening. we get emails from people saying they really enjoyed episodes. So we just kind of take that anecdotal, those anecdotal stories plus the data of the downloads and the data from the survey that went out, and we know we're we're doing a pretty good job. So yeah, I know mostly the analytics are something that we've been looking at. Obviously, you want to ask yourself, you know.

Is the results we're getting are enough people listening compared to the time and effort we're putting into it? Because obviously that's time that you could be working on other projects and doing other things. And I think that the numbers we saw in the response we saw both in the analytics and just kind of the word of mouth we heard through these surveys was that people really liked it and they really found value in it. And I think that's kind of really that was really important to us.

especially hearing that feedback, that they enjoyed it and that they're that they're listening to it. I think that this podcast could have been something that we just said, hey, the president's office wants to do it. Let's just do, let's just get something out there to make them happy. But I think because Lauren really put that intention behind it to make it something really meaningful and make it something really interesting, that it really is, I feel like a point of pride for our office at this point that we were able to do this and put this together and that we have these really cool and inspiring stories about our college out there. So

In addition to looking at those analytics and make sure making sure it's worth your time, you know, is it something that you're you you are proud to put out in front of people? And is it something that people really want to listen to? And and I think if we're we're looking at that measurements, I I think it was a really big success and I'm really happy with it. Yeah, that's such an such an important point. I love podcasts because they blend like the new digital way of measurements. Like you could see the who who listen, you could see like the city. Like I I have listeners that are in like

Somebody in France downloads every episode. I'm like, who is this person in France? You know, you can see where they're listening and how many downloads. But it's also like really PR-driven, where it's so valuable for the president for the person being interviewed. It's just such great, you know, PR. So even if one episode might only get 30 or 40 downloads, it might have such a tremendous effect to the person who had been interviewed or to the president.

Cheryl Broom (27:11.45)
or just knowing the college knowing that a certain topic was covered or a certain person was interviewed is really valuable. So it kind of blends the best of of old school, you know, PR and new school like digital analytics. So it's really fun. Well, as we close out this podcast, do you have any other tips or advice for colleges who are who are looking to go down this route themselves? We do, we do. so

Our main tips would be one to pick a really good host. So you really want to make sure that whoever is hosting it is personable, has a friendly voice, can speak pretty well and is engaging. And then on the flip side is to pick guests who connect with the host. We had a challenge where we brought in a guest who the president really had had never met this person.

And it was a good conversation, but you could just tell that the connection was different than when he knew the person. So we learned from that to to really try to seek out guests who who know him, they know each other. If they don't, maybe do even a little bit more work to get them to know each other beforehand. Recording multiple episodes in advance of your launch. in addition to that, we we put together a whole comprehensive.

marketing campaign behind it. We we branded it. We have a logo. It has a Holokin feel. We have flyers and posters. And so when we launched, we had all of that arsenal out there with the social media pushes and everything like that. So recording those multiple episodes in advance and having your branding all ready to go in advance really helped get people excited and into it. Building in time for transcription.

And ADA compliance, as Chris pointed out earlier, is very important. It's very time consuming. we have one of our team members here in public affairs that when we realized we needed to do that, we're like, okay, well, let's have you do that part of it. So it really is a team effort of everybody kind of does something with the podcast. And if you have a college audio and visual person.

Cheryl Broom (29:27.694)
See if there's some opportunity there. We were lucky that he already had a photo studio in place. So he had the space to build out a studio. And then we tasked him with researching the equipment. And he did that. We looked at the costs, tried to figure out what the best type of equipment was for our need, built out the budget and ordered that equipment, and then he set it all up. So finding someone who can handle that part of the puzzle.

And then adding your podcast to your marketing toolbox, we really look at when we're interacting with people at events or we're putting out press releases about certain things. Is there an element within the people that we're talking to that would make for a good podcast episode? So now, you know, that's always in our list of things to keep in mind. And you know, I'll shoot Chris an email when I come across something or someone that sounds like a good

topic and okay, let's keep this in mind for a future episode. And that's how we've gotten a lot of our guests on the podcast. Chris, if you want to add anything. Just so you know, to your last point about it being a tool in your toolbox, you know, like many things, you know, it it works well for certain things. It doesn't work well for other things. So again, starting with really thinking about your intent and why you feel you need to use a podcast, what, you know, what problem are you trying to solve? What issue are you trying to address?

you know, really looking at where the strengths and weaknesses of this format are and kind of using those to meet whatever objectives you're you're trying to look for. So really thinking of it as a tool, one tool of many that you have, whether it's marketing promotion or whether it's just awareness about your college, and really looking at that and having intent behind why you're using it, I think is something that I think really helped us.

Such wonderful advice. And it's been so much fun to talk to you both. And now I want to steal one thing you're doing. I want to do quick fire questions. Okay. Let's do it. So I have I just have two. And the first one is I want to know your favorite food. Okay. I can go first. And this one is weird and everybody always gets weirded out by it. But my favorite food, or I guess I should say my favorite meal, is chilled cucumber soup.

Cheryl Broom (31:47.124)
Wow, that is very unique. It is very unique. You should try it. If you like gazpacha, you might like it, but it is my favorite. Sounds refreshing. Yes. All right, Chris. I have a feeling yours is gonna be very different. Mine is decidedly more unhealthy. It's definitely pizza 100%. I could probably eat it for every meal: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, hot, colds, cheap pizza, expensive pizza. About it. All right. Well, I think I'm on Chris's team.

Sorry, Lauren. Most people are. It's okay. Okay. And my last question, Chris and I were chatting about this before you came on, Lauren, but where's a bucket list spot you want to go? Dream vacation. I would love to go to Tahiti to Bora Bora someday. What I have always wanted to do is do like a really fun like road trip across the country, kind of a coast to coast thing. I I'd really just kind of like to see a bunch of

America. You know, I I grew up here in California. And so I would love to just, you know, hop in a car with my wife and hit the road and, you know, eat at every restaurant I could find and have some fun, take some pictures to just kind of see just kind of see America. I love it. Well, I'm heading in a couple weeks to Machu Picchu for my dream vacation. So I am so excited and I love both of yours as well, are on my bucket list.

So I love this rapid fire thing. I'm totally gonna steal it from you guys. It's great when you get to ask a like Board of Trustees member, you know, what album would you take to a desert island or like ice cream? You know, you don't get to ask a trustee that often. Well, you get a little glimpse into people's true personalities and take them out of the seriousness of the interview. So it's it is a great, a great idea. And I always learn something every time I have a podcast, and I've learned

so much being with the both of you and I really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Cheryl Broom (33:54.51)
Thank you for listening to Higher Education Coffee and Conversation. If you like the podcast, please leave me a five-star rating. And to discover more great higher education-related content, make sure to visit us at graduatecommunications.com. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for listening. Thank you for the hard work you do for students each and every day.