New podcast aims to reach unique demographic

The Merrick Foundation, Inc. is trying their hand at content creation this year with its newly established podcast entitled Merrick Foundation: Making an Impact Together. 
Merrick Foundation Executive Director Shauna Graham said that she hopes the endeavor, which had released four episodes as of last week, helps expose the philanthropic organization and the local causes it supports to a new demographic.
“This is something that we talked about in our strategic plan last summer,” she said. “One of the questions we were facing was: ‘Where do people get their information?’
“We have a really loyal base who read the newspapers; we have some people who will tell us, ‘Oh, we didn’t see that on social media;’ and then we have this other group of people who are getting things from podcasts, and who are really loyal to the podcasts they follow,” she added. “We’re just trying to reach all avenues…Hopefully, wherever people get their information, they see Merrick Foundation.”
Graham, who “MCs” the podcast, said that the Merrick Foundation is hoping to release episodes biweekly—every two weeks—with the content to vary from more in-depth interviews with members of organizations the Merrick Foundation supports to shorter episodes focused on awareness.
“It’s been about eight weeks ago that it launched, and we just launched our fourth episode,” said Graham. “Biweekly is kind of our plan. We want to be able to keep it going and try to establish a release schedule that feels like something we could maintain.”
Reflecting the podcast’s longer-form interview content are its February 17th episode “Rescuing Hope,” in which Graham talks to 
Kellie Granfeld, founder of The Good Life Rescue, about her love for animals and the work her organization is doing to save them; and its March 5th episode “Running Towards Opportunity,” in which she talks to Andrew and Natalie Pearson, the leaders of the Central City Track Club, about the origins, mission, and growth of the Merrick County youth sports organization. Reflecting the shorter-form content is a March 17th episode, “The 10 Most Common Grant Questions—Answered!” in which Graham provides answers to what she has found to be ten typical grant questions.
“There will be some episodes like the [March 17th] one,” said Graham. “But for the most part, I will be interviewing our grantees or the people and organizations that we work with.”
Graham said she also planned to conduct interviews with people involved with the Merrick Foundation directly, including Chief Financial Officer Courtney Retzlaff.
“She was a [Certified Public Accountant] before she joined us, and she just has a wealth of knowledge in terms of talking with donors and how funds are set up and that kind of thing,” said the executive director. “We’re super fortunate—the foundation—to have her, and there will be times when I interview her.”
Graham said that one thing that she, other staff, and members of the Merrick Foundation board were excited about was using the podcast as a means to “amplify the stories of” the nonprofits that the foundation chooses to support.
“We get super moving grant requests…and kind of the idea is to just let people know about all of the great things that are happening in the area,” she said. “There were some nonprofits that we funded that, I hadn’t even known they existed…I feel like if they had more of a platform to tell their stories, more people would get involved.”
Once the Merrick Foundation committed to creating a podcast, said Graham, making it happen had been “pretty straightforward,” especially as the executive director already has experience creating podcasts, having previously published a podcast called Greetings from Holland: Parenting a Child with Down Syndrome. 
“My oldest daughter has down syndrome, and I did a podcast about down syndrome around three years ago,” she said.
The podcast’s title is a reference to Welcome to Holland, a poem about “having a child with a disability” by Emily Perl Kingsley.
As she had for Greetings from Holland, Graham used Buzzsprout—a podcast hosting platform that helps users upload, manage, and distribute podcasts—to get Merrick Foundation: Making an Impact Together published on all the major podcast directories.
“Buzzsprout actually makes things fairly simple,” said the executive director. “You create an account, and once you upload [an episode] there, they push it out to, really, all of the places that host podcasts.”
The service requires a subscription fee of “twelve dollars a month.”
To record and edit the podcast episodes—which Graham does herself—the executive director uses Audacity, a free and open-source digital audio editing and recording software.
“Basically, we bought some microphones and headsets,” said Graham. “We’re using limited equipment, but I try my best to make it professional.”
Thanks to Buzzsprout, listeners can access the podcast from virtually any podcast platform.
Graham said she was happy with the listening numbers so far, with the majority coming from Apple Podcasts.
“I think things are going pretty well,” said the executive director. “Both of the nonprofits we’ve interviewed so far were really excited to be a part of it…and being able to tell those stories was one of our main drivers.”
The Merrick Foundation’s goal with the podcast going forward, said Graham, is to “interview all of the grantees that we grant on an annual basis”—including potentially the Palmer Community Club, Palmer Rescue Squad, and the Maplewood Corners board—but also to “pivot” and “adapt” to cover other stories related to the foundation and area organizations as they arise.
The podcast is conceived as having seasons, taking a break from its biweekly schedule in the summer before restarting in the fall.
“I hope that this is something we can continue doing well into the future,” concluded Graham of the project. “I think it’s good information to have, and people all get their information differently, so the more platforms we can be on, the better we can spread our mission and our impact.
“If there’s anything that the Merrick Foundation is part of that people would like us to tell a story about, let us know.”