Having said that, every nonprofit has different needs and they need to prioritize. For some, podcasting may be a good choice. It’s a matter of what tools help you achieve your organizational goals.

The key is to ask the same questions you’d ask when deciding about any social media tool:

1. What is your goal?
2. Who are you trying to reach?
3. What kind of content do you have, or want to share?
4. How much time do you have?
5. How much tech expertise does your staff have?
6. What’s your budget?

A podcast may be the appropriate answer to those questions.

I also agree with Sallie that you have to test. In the case of producing a podcast, you can experiment with kinds of content, show length, hosts, music, listener participation, and distribution format (e.g. online player, iTunes subscription, iPhone app., transcription) to see what resonates the best with your audience.

Thanks, Sallie, good points! Certainly there are valuable podcasts out there that speak to important target audiences, so that should be a primary consideration for any organization. And as you say … research, then test!

If folks in the nonprofit community are having success with your podcasts, we’d love to hear your stories and why you think it’s working well.

I’d think the answer to “Should your non-profit produce a podcast?” would have to be “It depends.” Where do the people you want to reach hang out on the Internet? What do they do there? Are they already podcast listeners? It’s true, podcasting is no longer flavor of the month and people are not jumping onto that bandwagon trying to get rich quick. Yet there are still individuals and companies who start new audio podcasts and get great business results from them.

Yes, it is labor-intensive to produce a good podcast. No, it may not be the best use of your non-profit’s resources. But it’s also possible that jumping on the bandwagon of whatever is flavor of THIS month is ALSO not the best use of your organization’s resources. Everybody carries on and on and on about video, and most people use it as badly as they use PowerPoint. Many people seem to ignore the possible bandwidth and data transfer issues, not of the donors to their causes, but of the people they are trying to help.

As Christopher S. Penn likes to say, you have to test. Find out what’s ACTUALLY going to work for YOUR market, rather than following the trends and what the gurus are saying. You might have a constituency for whom SMS text messaging is the most effective means of communication, even if it’s not at all trendy, because people have phones, mostly older phones, and not computers.

And you might be working with people who don’t have time for video and think Facebook and Twitter are for kids, but who would listen to a podcast while commuting.