Podcasting for Non-Profit
What does it take to launch and grow a podcast at a community-based arts organisation?
And is it worth the effort for non-profits?
Melanie Precious hosted five seasons of the Greenwich Dance podcast Talking Moves
“It became not just an output that we put out there, but something that was really feeding how we continued to to build our own trajectory.”
As CEO of Greenwich Dance, Melanie Precious hosted five seasons of the dance podcast Talking Moves.
Like many podcasts, the show launched in 2020 when the UK was in its Autumn Covid lockdown.
But Talking Moves was never conceived as a response to the pandemic. Instead, the digital pivot that so many organisations made at that time opened a pathway for Greenwich Dance to launch Talking Moves.
Having had to close a programme of professional dance classes that helped Greenwich Dance staff keep their finger on the pulse of dance artists, the podcast aimed to open new lines of communication.
“The very first episode was Exhilarating or Exhausting”, Melanie recalls.
“It was about saying has COVID been exhilarating or exhausting to two dance artists.
“Alongside, we'd been running a blog series called Life in Lockdown, where we'd been paying artists to just diarise their week, tell us how they were staying creative.
And both of the artists that we invited on to that podcast had been quite vocal in those about how hard it had been.”
Listen to The Content Mavericks Club podcast
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Podcasting for Non-Profit feat. Melanie Precious
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[00:00:02] Jason: Welcome to the content Mavericks club, the podcast for content makers and content marketers who like to do things their own way. I'm Jason Caffrey, CEO of podcast production and marketing agency Creative Kin, and it's my great pleasure to welcome to the show someone who's really impressed me with their energy, creativity and their determination.
Melanie Precious is the former CEO of Greenwich Dance and the former host of the dance podcast Talking Moves, and we're going to talk about what convinced Melanie to make five seasons of Talking Moves, what Greenwich Dance got out of the podcast as a community-based arts organisation, and what advice Melanie would offer any other small non-profit who's thinking about making their own podcast.
If you enjoy the Content Maverick Club, please do give us a five star review. It really helps us reach other listeners right now. Let's say hi to Melanie.
Welcome. Melanie, thanks for being here.
[00:01:03] Melanie: Thank you.
It's an absolute honour. And a bit of a change for me to be this side as well.
[00:01:07] Jason: Yes. Yes.
Well, we'll have a little chat about that. So, what I wanted to talk to you about for this episode, Melanie, is your journey with the Talking Moves podcast, which was very specifically attached to Greenwich Dance. It was a Greenwich Dance podcast and you ran five seasons and I saw that you racked up 7, 000 downloads across that which I think is amazing myself. Where did it begin for you?
[00:01:43] How the Talking Moves podcast got started
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[00:01:43] Melanie: The idea came around pre COVID. Because we used to do something called Pro Class, which was professional class for dance artists. For 26 years, Greenwich Dance had had professional class every morning.
So there had been this kind of wash of artists going through the building and having conversations with the team at Greenwich Dance. And when I took over, we tried to reinvigorate Professional Class.
And what I found from the short time that we did do that was the artists would come up to the office, and talk to us about what was happening in their lives. They'd come up to the office to pick up the CD player to go and then teach class and in that process, just that really holistic process of, you know, checking in, 'How are you? Nice to see you. What's been happening?', we just got to find out what was rocking and rolling in a dance artist's world.
And then we had to stop because , it just wasn't washing its face in terms of income and we didn't have any funding to deliver professional class. It wasn't working.
So we, that channel of communication directly with the freelance artists that we were there to support had stopped.
So we've been starting to think about podcasts. I was very, I was very conscious that there didn't seem to be a dance podcast round.
And then I can't remember the exact timing here, but Lucy White, who was our marketing and digital communications consultant, had been to the Arts Marketing Conference and had been to a seminar that Hannah Hethmon had been giving about building a podcast. And her background is in museums. So she she done a lot of it through the heritage sector.
And so at the time that I was thinking about podcast, Lucy had been to this seminar, so we started to unpack what that might look like. And then the actual opportunity to start it happened with COVID. So it was the first Arts Council England chunk of COVID support funding.
We applied through that and said we'd really like start thinking about this podcast. So we used a bit of that funding to bring Hannah in to give us some training. And I think we launched that in autumn 2020.
[00:03:52] Jason: Right. Which would have been essentially. We've had a lockdown in spring. We've all gone out to the park in the summer.
And then we're kind of back in it around that time, right?
[00:04:04] Recording during COVID lockdown
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[00:04:04] Melanie: And of course we were doing the recording all the way through that. The very first episode was 'Exhilarating or Exhausting'. I remember it really well because it was about saying has COVID been exhilarating or exhausting to two dance artists? Alongside, we'd been running a blog series called Life in Lockdown, where we'd been paying artists to just diarise their week, tell us how they were staying creative. And both of the artists that we invited on to that podcast had been quite vocal in those about how hard it had been.
So the story of that first episode was very much capturing a lockdown feel to what arts and dance felt like. I think it was the second or third episode we got two dance artists in that had delivered an online tour.
So we were about to go out to community centres with a with a dance show and couldn't. So we pivoted online and two of those choreographers talked to us about their process. That's the only time we ever did an episode that was solely about something that Greenwich Dance had done. And from there on we kind of picked up.
[00:05:04] Jason: 2020, because of lockdown, saw this explosion in podcasting.
But what we've also seen is a huge drop off. So there was this big spike of new podcasts in 2020, and then most of those new podcasts just didn't continue.
And I spoke to the head of another small arts organisation who did a podcast, and when I talked to her about her experience, she said, ' you know what, there were good things, but I just, associate the podcast with that time and it was so scarring, I just can't do it'.
That clearly isn't what happened to you. You kept going.
And I guess the first question is why? What did you see in that first season that you thought, yeah, we should keep doing this?
[00:05:48] Expanding horizons and a positive feedback loop from Talking Moves
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[00:05:48] Melanie: Well, I think it comes right back to why we started it in the first place, that it was never done in direct response to COVID. COVID had enabled us to bring an idea to life because funding and support and the mechanism was there to facilitate digital production. Whereas before it might not have done. I should say that the podcast wasn't just me, there were three of us. So there was Lucy White, who was our marketing and digital consultant, and then Carmel Smith, who was our editor.
And I think we were just so passionate about doing it and enjoyed doing it. We knew from the minute that we launched that first series that we had to come back with another one.
Otherwise, we were dead in the water.
And it wasn't ever intended to just be a response to Covid. It was meant to be a response to the fact that we weren't having that dialogue with dance artists anymore. It was meant to be giving freelance dance artists a voice, and it was supporting our own organizational development.
So every one of those conversations, I would take something out of that conversation and feed it back into Greenwich Dance. All of the content was always linked back to the aims and objectives of Greenwich Dance as well. So we would never do a podcast about making work for a black box stage because we didn't have a black box stage. We never did that kind of work.
It was always relevant to the type of work we were doing. But it did enable us to invite artists from outside of our Greenwich sphere of influence. Greenwich Dance had a remit to support South East London more widely, so not just Greenwich. But, but never really nationally or internationally.
But this was an opportunity to reach far beyond those borders and bring dance artists in to have a conversation with us about how they were doing things that we could then feed into how we did things in Greenwich. So it became not just an output that we put out there, but something that was really feeding how we continued to to build our own trajectory.
So I think that's why we felt so passionately that that we needed to come back with another series. And it wasn't just a series and stop like, that was the beginning.
The issue then was where we got the funding.
[00:08:07] Jason: And I'll come back to that, but you've described some very clear goals.
So you talked about wanting to keep that channel of communication open with other dancers in your profession, have something that is an offer for them and then bring back useful feedback into your organisation about how you ran your organisation, what you did with your organisation?
[00:08:32] Moving to a physical-digital hybrid model
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[00:08:32] Melanie: Absolutely. I can't remember one conversation or any episode that didn't send me off thinking about how we could do things differently, every single episode did. But a couple of episodes I could pull on as examples: right in that first season we did one called Summer of the Zoom Class.
So as you said, we launched in the autumn, we'd just gone through that summer of digital. And I really truly thought that those two artists would tell me how hard it had been to do digital dance classes online, and how they didn't want to do any more of them ever again. And that wasn't what they said at all.
They told me about the challenges, yes, but some of the benefits, the different ways that they were working with those participants. And it made me think to myself maybe we shouldn't ever go back to fully physical. Perhaps we should always have some kind of digital offer. So it made me start to think about what that looked like.
Much later on we then launched a tutorial series of Lindy Hop dance classes, and one of those artists, Wendy, who'd been on podcast, was part of the making of that. And that's living on YouTube now, and it's got over 30, 000 views
[00:09:43] Jason: and that, that Lindy Hop project wasn't, it wasn't purely a digital project, because I remember, but I'm sure they're still there on Greenwich Dances, and your Instagram feeds images of the Lindy Hop sessions, right?
[00:09:55] Melanie: So we had classes originally. We never went back to regular classes of Lindy Hop, but we did social nights.
So we had some funding from Royal Borough of Greenwich through their Black History Month to do four social nights. So again, Wendy and Temujin, who was the artist from Grounded Movement that we always worked with whenever we were doing Lindy Hop, curated those with my producer to create some really lovely moments that we could take to your real bread and butter community centres, you know, we went to Abbey Wood, we went to Shrewsbury House, we went to Charlton House and Glyndon Community Centre. And each one had a slightly different feel, we had cake and water and tea, Shrewsbury House had a bar so there was some alcohol. Some of them had a pre recorded playlist.
We had a jazz band at another. We had a jazz DJ at another. So we played around with different formats. And, , then the digital part was also sitting online. So the idea is you could just learn how to do Lindy hop at home You could skill up using the tutorial series and then come to one of our events So yeah, absolutely.
It's about building how an online engagement could dovetail with what we might do in a physical space. And I don't know if that would have come about if we hadn't had that conversation about Summer of the Zoom Class. There was another episode where we were talking with Karthika Naïr, who is a dramaturg, who wrote The Honey Hunter.
And that was the book, actually, that was, the basis of Chotto Desh, which I went to see last week at the South Bank. She worked with Akram Khan to do that. But when we had a conversation about dramaturgy, we were thinking to ourselves wouldn't it be exciting to do something with that book audiences in Greenwich, again going back into community centres, something that's really, almost got no tech or production around it, it's just really raw, and so we started to have a series of conversations with her, we put in a number of applications to try and make that idea happen, and again it came completely out of that podcast and being able to have that conversation with a dramaturg of her standing living in France. Ordinarily we're meant to be delivering locally, but the podcast gave permission and made it so that a local organisation could become an international one through that podcasting mechanism.
[00:12:04] Jason: Amazing. Amazing. I want to ask about the audience because you talked about wanting to reach other dancers But much of what you're talking about is about the community that Greenwich Dance was serving.
And so I'm just really interested to know if there's an overlap in both of those podcast audiences or what data you gathered about who was listening, who you were reaching, and what kind of feedback you got.
[00:12:31] Talking Moves podcast audience - understanding who is listening.
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[00:12:31] Melanie: This is where you need Lucy rather than me in this seat, . So I'm gonna do my best.
And I did quiz her.
[00:12:37] Jason: We could give her a call ,
[00:12:38] Melanie: So we had limited data because we used Libsyn as our dissemination platform we didn't pay for the full amount, you know, doing everything on a shoestring. So most of the data that we got was from Spotify and possibly wasn't telling us the whole story.
So what we do know is that we were able to reach 28 countries by the time we'd finished. So that felt amazing. And we knew from downloads we were achieving, something like 180, downloads per episodes on average. And always our first one, had the most downloads.
But again, it's about accumulative data counting, when you put one out, that stays out when you put the second one out, and that's still there when you put the third one out. So people are still finding that first one. So the first one's always
[00:13:28] Jason: growing. So when you, when you say the first one, you published in seasons.
So you're talking about the first episode of the season.
[00:13:35] Melanie: The very first episode of the podcast ever, I think is still, the episode that was the most listened to. Because people would come in, perhaps find it in.
Series three episode five and then track back through the archives and find stuff So we found that really interesting to look at but who were those people that I probably can't tell you that's the one I suppose Difficulty with podcasting is that you are or we were going out to an audience That is quite silent, they don't have that ability to feedback and we would say at the end, send us your questions or, like and subscribe and give us your reviews, but that didn't really happen too much.
There were a couple of times when we got emails with suggestions for episodes, but, we didn't always felt that we knew, it can be quite scary because you're putting stuff out there. You can see people are downloading it. We don't quite know who or why or how.
We got some amazing feedback from some really key people in our industry that we respect, who said that they loved the transcripts. Some of them, would download the transcripts and use them in, reports or research or whatever. And other people would be using the audio version.
So we knew that there was a sense. Funny enough. Having now closed Greenwich Dance, I'm hearing more and more how important people felt the podcast, which we sometimes didn't know at the time. But who we were trying to reach . We were definitely thinking about students, people coming into the industry.
Definitely wanted to be able to show them. Some stories of inspiration from some of the other artists around. We were always conscious to try and program a mix of voices, so Someone like Gary Clark, who's really well known in the industry, has got amazing award winning shows. And then someone like Katie Serridge, who was one of the artists who did email in.
She was a student that had been studying at Laban and had graduated just after, COVID. And she said she was binge listening to the entire series, but felt that she wanted to give the perspective of somebody that had come into the industry and just faced a load of closed doors because it had changed while she was at college.
And that felt really empowering for us. It tracked right back to why we'd set it up. At the beginning, we didn't just want big names. We wanted real people who were working in the industry in that mix of a name that you might be interested to find out what their work was like, and also those people that are really jobbing and, and just doing great stuff, but you might not know their name but they've got really valuable things to say.
So that felt important. So we thought that students would find it really enriching and we hope that other artists would. It was about our arm of artist support, which we felt that we should be delivering as a dance development agency. So it was enabling other people to hear.
Other artists practice and learn and be inspired and bounce off of that, which felt really great. We were dreaming and scheming for ways of getting more feedback. We put in an application to the Arts Council actually to take the podcast on a roadshow and do it in colleges.
So we could have a live audience. Still keep the format of having the conversation. But then open up the floor and allow the audience to ask the panel some questions as well and record the whole thing.
The other thing I would say is that perhaps now. We did post things into LinkedIn, but not so much. And I think if we were doing it again now, we might use that platform a bit more. 'cause I've noticed having been on it a little bit more since Grenwich Chance closed that. Conversations do tend to happen on LinkedIn people will post something and the comments that follow that will often be in response to that, which I think happened less on Twitter and Facebook.
So that that might have been a platform that we could have, use slightly differently.
[00:17:30] Jason: So you were using Twitter and Instagram to promote. Episodes
[00:17:35] Melanie: we were, we'd got a newsletter. We had about 5,000 subscribers on our newsletter, and we had That's a
[00:17:41] Jason: great, great vehicle to Yeah. Get the word out.
[00:17:43] Melanie: Absolutely. We had a digital stage on our website. So we redid the website through Covid, so that that enabled us to give the, the podcast more of a spotlight, really. We've got a little banner on the top. I'm sure it's got a proper name in marketing terms, but as you go onto the front page, the little banner at the top that pointed you straight to Talking Moves.
We had our digital stage, which we would post the episodes into. Lucy would create Little trailers. Now we didn't use video because we were doing it entirely remotely but she created these kind of little, little video trailers with a bit of transcript and pulling out a couple of choice quotes from the episode.
So that would all go onto, onto YouTube. And then we would use our social media platforms which were Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram within the confines of a small arts organisation, the capacity we had to do any of that stuff. So, right, which is
[00:18:36] Jason: right, which I think is probably a good moment to go back to the conversation around money and resources.
Where did the funding come from? How did you justify it inside your organization and the other resources that you applied to the show Talking Moves?
[00:18:56] Justifying the cost of running a podcast
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[00:18:56] Melanie: All interesting questions. So let me, let me try and unpack them. Funding kicked off with that Arts Council Cultural Recovery and was able to continue through imaginative re budgeting, I think.
We never really had a dedicated chunk of funding specifically for Talking Moves. We just made it happen because we knew it was important because it we knew it was making us visible at a time when we felt we really needed to be visible. It was growing our audience beyond Greenwich and southeast London, which we felt was hugely important but it lived across our marketing and artistic program, which I think is probably worth unpacking a bit more During Covid because the activity we were planning to do changed,
we were able to make the case for spending some of it on, on the podcast. And then we just eked it out. I think there was one time where we prepaid for some of it because the funding had to be used in a, particular timeframe. And so we were like, right, okay, well, let's pay for two seasons of this then.
And so there was a little bit of creativity going on there. The three person team was really important to us. We had very dedicated roles. So Lucy was in charge of the marketing and distribution. That was absolutely her bag. She would schedule it all out as we looked at the. At the years coming up and when those seasons would be recorded and released.
So she was largely in control of that. Again, you know, there was always a bit of flexibility. As an organization, we were fighting fire for the entire time I was there. So nothing was ever certain. You could never look too far into the future. But we did that the best we could. And then Carmen was our editor, dedicated editor.
And it was more expensive to do, I imagine, than other podcasts because of this reason.
[00:20:57] Jason: Because you had those people, the human resources.
[00:20:59] Melanie: Because we had those human resources, which I would still say were probably not enough for what we were doing. My salary, my time was being paid through my salary.
But the others were both freelance. We always paid our contributors because the model was never 'let's get someone who's got something to promote, and bring them on', which many podcasts do completely understand why, but because ours was issue based, we were trying to, to get a subject we wanted to talk about and then find people that could talk about that subject.
And, and because part of our ethos was about supporting freelancers, we felt we had to pay them. Carmel had. I think she spent at least a day, possibly two, probably definitely two, at the beginning and everything got a little bit quicker as we all got a bit more skilled. She might have even gone into three days.
I think we were overworking her big time.
[00:21:55] Jason: In terms of how long she spent editing.
[00:21:57] Melanie: Yeah, she would live in that podcast once we'd recorded it. And I'll explain a bit more about how we did that if that's useful.
[00:22:05] Deciding on a discussion format for the podcast
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[00:22:05] Jason: £I just want to jump in just just to let our listeners know
it was a what we call a disco format. It was a discussion format. So you are hosting and you would have two guests, which is for me immediately obvious that there would be an extra burden on Carmel when it comes to editing.
[00:22:23] Melanie: Yes that's useful to say . Our inspiration actually was the bottom line I know that that's quite a dry
I love it, but it's quite a dry boy. It's not very exciting, but that idea of Evan Davis and his three panelists and on one topic, we really took a lot of inspiration from that the choice of having two guests was only ever because we were using a platform called Squadcast at the time. And at the time, I think they've changed it now, but at the time that we were using it, you could only have four people in a room.
So that was me and Carmel and then two guests. So that's why we had two guests and not three. Oh, you would have gone, you would have gone larger. We might have done. We were talking about that at the time because we, because we were using the bottom line as the, as the inspiration. You'd have left Carmel on the floor.
I think we would have done. I think we would have done. It was enough having two, it was rich with content, it was nice for me as a host to have two people to have a conversation because it was about a conversation, not an interview. And actually that was so refreshing
[00:23:27] Melanie: As the host, because sometimes I could just almost sit back and let two people talk. Of course, there are challenges. You're, you're trying still to get. Ideally, keep to your narrative. There were moments when that went in the bin, you know, in the room when you're going, this is just not going this way.
And that's fine. We'll go somewhere else. But ideally you're trying to keep it on that narrative, but you're also wanting those two artists to interact with each other. Cause sometimes that's where the best bits were. And as we said, it wasn't a deep dive into a particular dance artist's career.
it was very much about whatever topic we've chosen, so we were really always trying to pull it back to what that topic was. So of course then Carmel's got all the tracks We also had a little trick which she called upon a number of times, which was we would ask everybody, including myself, to record on their phone using voice memo, so we'd have a backup recording.
We'd then send our tracks in to her, so she had the, the data that she's been able to pull off of Squadcast, plus the three sets of recordings that come into her and a number of times she'd had to use the phone one rather than Squadcast because of something like wi fi in Wales or you know
[00:24:42] Jason: Wales gets such a bad rap. I'm sure the Wi Fi in Wales is amazing.
[00:24:47] Melanie: But so, so, so she would be doing that. And again, because she knows dance so well, because she's a journalist by background, she was able to, to make sure that that story was nice and tight. And, and I always thought I was my best version of me when I've got Carmel behind me knowing that she's gonna edit out all the stupid things I say. So I think I should find a way of carrying her with me to edit throughout.
[00:25:14] Jason: You're listening to the Content Mavericks Club with me Jason Caffrey. Still to come, what would Melanie do differently if she was going to make talking moves again? And what would she say to a small non profit that's thinking about making a podcast? We'll be back after a short break.
[00:25:35] Jason: You're listening to the Content Mavericks Club, the podcast for content makers and content marketers who like to do things a bit differently. I'm Jason Caffrey and my guest for this edition is the former CEO of Greenwich Dance and former host of the dance podcast, Talking Moves, Melanie Precious.
It is amazing Melanie to hear you describe that process, that production process and I am really, really impressed.
Because so much of what you're talking about is what I am always talking whenever anybody asked me about podcasting and actually I wrote a blog piece it was a little bit provocative saying why the first thing you should do is not buy a microphone just forget the microphones right now because Actually, the time you spend in front of the mic is, what, 5%?
10 percent of the production process. So you've described how you have actually a big picture plan. You're then mapping your, the subjects, the issues you want to talk about. Who are the people that you might then join to that subject? Who are the right voices? And then you've got the technical thing, tape syncing when you record at your end as well, so you kind of handle that technical part, that is an operation.
[00:27:02] Running the with ambitious production values
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[00:27:02] Melanie: It's a big operation and, it had as high production values as we could possibly create with the time we had, using the remote we couldn't, because we had two guests and myself and Carmel, Trying to get us into a studio never really happened.
So we were always going to stay, I think, remote. Particularly because it enabled us to be able to speak to somebody in Sierra Leone or whatever, which we did do. But It meant that, we had to invest that time into creating a really lovely edited version.
We weren't just pressing record and then putting out that entirety of that recording. We were tightening it up all the way along.
[00:27:44] Jason: Why did those production values matter. Why did you feel that it was important to invest in those? Because you've, you've talked about the, the challenges of applying the resources and an alternative way to do it might have been to just Squadcast record top and tail, put an intro on, put an outro on and press publish.
[00:28:07] Melanie: Yeah, we everything we did, we tried to get the highest quality we could. And I think you and I were having a discussion about the audience experience. You know, you have Every man and his dog during lockdown was made into a podcast. And a woman. Every man, woman and his dog. There's a lot of content available out there.
It's all for free, largely. So yours has got to stand out from the crowd and be worth listening to. I think Carmel would have preferred to have had a slight shorter, we were always aiming around about half an hour. It never was and she always tried to pull it down into a 45 minute, ideally we never got to, to a half hour . I think, going back to the bottom line, they do, smash that conversation out in half an hour. We were never quite able to do that, but you're thinking about your audience's time, they haven't got forever. And you want them to see, see through the journey. You want them to get to the end and you want it to be a pleasant experience. There's nothing worse than listening to bad audio. So we tried really hard to make that as high quality as we could.
[00:29:14] Jason: That's a bit of a provocative question n for me because I'm completely sold on production values. And for me personally, it's just how I have worked and trained. And they are my production values as much as anything else. I think it can be useful to think about it in terms of respect for your audience because they do give you their time.
[00:29:40] Melanie: Yeah.
[00:29:40] Jason: And as you say, you want them to have the best experience they can.
[00:29:44] Melanie: Yeah. I would also say that the production values being high is really attributed to Carmel. She was looking after Greenwich Dance's reputation.
And she was looking after me I knew I was safe in that space because I knew we were never going to put out something where I sounded atypical. If I, if I said anything completely stupid, that would go.
I, I'm, so I, I felt really Looked after in the space, as I hope the guests did . Because we knew that it had this value, all round it. And then of course Lucy made it look beautiful, so that was her responsibility and she did a great job of, of doing that.
So I think it was about those two and, and their amazing experience that really helped to, to make it what it was.
[00:30:31] Jason: And what they have done with you as a team, is present the brand, present Greenwich Dance in the way that you want Greenwich Dance to be presented.
[00:30:43] Melanie: Yes, I think you're absolutely right.
[00:30:45] Jason: Not as a DIY presentation, but something that actually offers quality throughout.
[00:30:51] Melanie: There you go. Yes.
[00:30:53] Talking Moves as a legacy of Greenwich Dance
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[00:30:53] Jason: Greenwich Dance, Greenwich Dance sadly has closed and the Talking Moves podcast. is, it's still getting downloads.
It's still got an audience. I think what I'd like to ask you about now is what you feel the legacy is. What value does Talking Moves, the podcast, have now that A, it's become, if you like, an archive show, and B, the organisation that it's attached to has closed.
[00:31:30] Melanie: Well. We've heard from just conversations anecdotally in the sector, how pleased people are that that resource is still available to artists.
I would like to think that it that it does offer a legacy. Greenwich Dance's website will be live for, for two years and then, and then that will go. So we'll have prominence there as well as, being able to be found through podcast platforms and whatnot when you search for things.
But it means that we'll still have a voice in the sector, if you like. that first season, of course, was about lockdown. And I think that's got merit in itself, just as a time capsule for what that felt like. Those were recorded in it. So if we go back to them, we'll remember what that felt like.
And it's tracked us as we've moved out of that lockdown, actually, and I don't think any of the topics that we've talked about, women in dance, doing dance differently, working with communities working with young people making positive change, all these kind of subjects that we talked about, I think there was, there will probably still stay for a while. And because of Lucy was really clever in the way that she transcribed everything. There was always transcripts. Because those transcripts are there, people have been using them, as I said, for research and things like that as well. So, I hope it will, it will feel like a, yeah, a rich archive of conversations from some amazing people that people can, can draw upon and be inspired by and think about.
[00:33:03] Getting the podcasting bug
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[00:33:03] Jason: Would you do it again?
[00:33:04] Melanie: I'd love, we'd love to. All three of us. We were already having meetings about how we can do it again. We did consider for a short period of time trying to take talking moves itself. But it offers some legal challenges. You know, those artists have, have agreed to have a conversation with Greenwich Dance.
And not that that was not a challenge we could overcome but in the short period of time we had to close everything down it felt like an unnecessary piece of work. It can, it can just exist as it, as it is, but we'd love to do something from the team behind Talking Moves. We're not quite sure What yet , and I think that goes back to some of those first questions you asked me about why we started talking moves what the aims and objectives are and we've got to We've got to knuckle down and and understand what that is
[00:33:48] Jason: Because those will have changed
[00:33:50] Melanie: Because those have changed the the other thing that was really important to talking moves as I said before is it always tracked back into Greenwich dance and we don't have that, so why are we doing it? And what are we pulling from so we're still having those conversations. It might depend on on where we will end up, you know, what the next job is maybe it's something that we do independently. We're not quite sure, but, but certainly with, yeah,
[00:34:13] Jason: it sounds like you've got the bug though Melanie.
[00:34:16] Melanie: It's fun. It's fun to do. I loved having those conversations. I'm not, I have got some journalism background. I used to be a critic for Dance Europe. So I was used to interviewing people. But it's a different ball game when you're being recorded, when you're trying to listen, when you're trying to listen to two people, when you're trying to pull on what they say, when you're trying to move them along your narrative.
when you're trying to sound interested, even though you're panicking about what the next question is going to be. And everyone's spoken for half an hour on the first question and you have got no time left for your others. And you're, you're trying to do that as well. So, you know, having, again, having the team of Carmel and Lucy around me meant I wasn't on my own doing that.
And I learned a lot through it and got better at it, I think. And I, I enjoyed holding that space and, and providing that, that space for people to have those conversations.
[00:35:11] The final Talking Moves episode with Tarek Iskander and Sir Nicholas Hytner
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[00:35:11] Melanie: I think on the very last, episode we did with Tarek Iskander and Nicholas Heitner, if I can, can I talk about how that one came about?
[00:35:20] Jason: Please do
[00:35:21] Melanie: very different to the rest. So we did. We did five series and one and that was the 'And One'. And it was because we were already looking at the writing on the wall for Greenwich Dance. We knew things were difficult.
We were already talking about closure. We were really struggling funding was such a massive conversation and Sir Nicholas Heitner had gone out with his article about the arts being on the brink of collapse and
[00:35:45] Jason: Sir Nicholas Heitner
[00:35:47] Melanie: He's the artistic director of the bridge but previously was from the National Theatre And this article was in the Guardian and it got it got huge response Some really really positive some really really negative and I was frustrated at the sector's response to it because they just leapt onto the The particular idea that he put forward as opposed to taking the opportunity, I thought, to have the arts in a national newspaper and the crisis that we're in have a spotlight put on it nationally, if not internationally.
So I went out with an article in Arts Professional, but we were still thinking, what can we do to harness this moment and talk more about this? And I realized that the platform we had available to us was the podcast, you know, I'd, I'd, I'd written something and, and in, and in the article, I'd said Something along the lines of we need to come together as a sector and tell government what it is we want otherwise if a new government comes in we'll just like look like headless chickens so people were coming to me going, yes, yes, we need to do this group and I was like, ah, I just run a small local arts charity, I, I can't make that happen. And it was one day when I was like, well, the podcast is the vehicle. That's what we've got. We've got no funding though. So how do we do it?
So I got the team together and I said, what do you think about doing a podcast episode? We talked about doing more, we were going to do two or three, but again, it was down to money. We didn't have any, we were literally going, this has to be said. So let's just make this work quickly. And it was the only time where we were able to mobilize that big operation really quickly. So we reached out to St. Nicholas through a contact that we had. We reached out to Tarek. They agreed to come on the podcast.
[00:37:40] Jason: Tarek Iskander.
[00:37:40] Melanie: He's an artistic director at Battersea Arts Centre, and he'd gone out in 2020 with a really interesting article in the stage about a national arts service.
He used to work in the NHS, so he was calling upon his experience to present what he thought might be a solution. So we were able to just kind of pull them in the room and have what felt like a really urgent, timely conversation. Whereas the other conversations we'd had weren't so timely. They weren't so much about that moment.
But it was also interesting because we had that podcast platform available to us. We had the microphone, if you like, to raise a little bit more interest in this particular subject that we felt was important to get out there
[00:38:22] Podcasting tips for non-profit organisations
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[00:38:22] Jason: Greenwich Dance isn't with us. And that is, yes, if you're listening and you're not watching Melanie's, the corner of Melanie's mouth just immediately turned down there. And, and yes, I agree. It is sad. And it's a, it's an illustration of how hard it is for a lot of small, if I may use that word
for Greenwich Dance, small arts organizations, small non profit organizations. How difficult it is for them now, because I think in many ways, in our minds, we've kind of moved on from COVID, but it's still playing out. So what would you say to another small Outfit.
And if you're the marketing person or the CEO of a small nonprofit arts organization and you're looking at a podcast as a vehicle, what would you say to that person about what to look out for, what to ask themselves and what the pros and cons are?
[00:39:28] Melanie: I would say to anyone who's thinking about doing a podcast, they're amazing, but they take a huge resource, and the biggest resource, this, these are Lucy's own words, this weekend when I was talking to her about it, is time, Do you have the time to be able to afford it? Because I think you've got to jump in with both feet and really commit. And as I've been saying, it was more than just a marketing vehicle. It was very much about our artistic programming. So can you turn it into part of your fundamental artistic output?
Certainly, as Greenwich dance. We were really thinking about how the podcast was going to stay, stay with us. I, I had to go back to our application for National Portfolio Organizational Funding to the Arts Council last year I wanted to remind myself what it felt like. When we were looking hopefully to the future and I reminded myself that the podcast was up there and central to what we were planning to go into, the next sort of three, five years with. So think about whether that's true for you if you're thinking about doing a podcast or by all means do a short one, but no.
That it is, you know. Serial and This American Life is so good at that kind of thing, aren't they? Where it's a, it's a contained thing. You know, it's almost like a dance production. As a podcast. That's great. You mean,
[00:40:52] Jason: you mean like a produce a season?
[00:40:54] Melanie: Yeah, where, where it's meant to be a season, it might work really well for a project that there's a podcast that goes with that particular project. Really think about where it sits. And if it doesn't have that, timeline or that framework around it then make sure that it's something that you can commit that time to because it will pull on the team.
And I almost wanted it to pull more on my team because I wanted it to feel like it really was part and parcel of who Greenwich Dance were. It would have been amazing to have had dance artists creating an advisory group around it. We went out with all kinds of exciting ideas about how Talking Moves was going to be a brand.
And the podcast only one part of that brand and we could have had, you know, discussions in person, discussions, pro class artists, curating talks, they could have been loads that went around and built around the podcast rather than the podcast being the add on to the other thing. So just think about where it's sitting in your portfolio of projects and whether you really can afford the money.
For the equipment and tech and production, but also that the resource of the time and energy and, and, and thinking when we went into the recording of those, those series, they were full on, doing two or three of those a week, you've got to go into those conversations having prepared, and it's like a performance.
So there's a bit of tension as you go in and you come out, if we go into the next one and what have you, so it's not, it's not. It's always easy to do, you know, it does draw on resources.
[00:42:24] Jason: Melanie, thank you so much for coming and speaking to the Content Mavericks Club. It's so, so good to have had you here in the studio speaking with me.
I'm really grateful. And I am very much looking forward to the day. that comes when you are back on this side of the table, doing your own podcast thing. So thank you very much indeed, Melanie.
[00:42:45] Melanie: Thank you for having me. It's been a delight.
[00:42:46] Jason: That's it for this edition of the Content Mavericks Club, the podcast for content professionals who like to do things their own way. Many thanks to my guest Melanie Precious for sharing her insight, her experience and her expertise when it comes to running a podcast for a small arts organization. And thank you.
for listening. Please do leave us a five star review. It really helps us reach other listeners and it's a great way to support the show. And if you'd like to find out more about other guests who feature on the show, head over to content Mavericks dot club. Thanks very much for your company. I'll see you in the next edition of the content Mavericks club.
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00:00 Introducing Melanie Precious
1:43 How the Talking Moves podcast got started
04:04 Recording during COVID lockdown
05:48 Expanding horizons and a positive feedback loop from Talking Moves
08:32 Moving Greenwich Dance to a physical-digital hybrid model
12:31 The Talking Moves podcast audience - understanding who is listening.
18:56 Justifying the cost of running a podcast
22:05 Deciding on a discussion format for the podcast
27:02 Running the show with ambitious production values
30:53 Talking Moves as a legacy of Greenwich Dance
33:03 Getting the podcasting bug
38:22 Podcasting tips for non-profit organisations
Expanding horizons
As the show progressed, Greenwich Dance was able to use the podcast to push beyond the boundaries of its South London service base.
Talking Moves featured renowned national and international figures such as Karthika Naïr, Sir Nicholas Hytner and Tarek Iskander.
And this generated fresh ideas and opened avenues to collaborations and projects that had previously been beyond the scope of what Greenwich Dance thought it might achieve.
“This was an opportunity to reach far beyond those borders”, says Melanie, “and bring dance artists in to have a conversation with us about how they were doing things that we could then feed into how we did things in Greenwich.
“Every one of those conversations, I would take something… and feed it back into Greenwich Dance.
“All of the content was always linked back to the aims and objectives of Greenwich Dance as well.”
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Archive as legacy
With the funding crunch that followed the Arts Council England 2023 round of National Portfolio Organisation allocations, Greenwich Dance came under increasing financial pressure, and closed in December that same year.
Greenwich Dance re-homed its remaining resources, which allowed some of its programmes to continue with other organisations.
And its digital output survives too, at least for the time being.
The company’s website will remain live until the end of 2025, and the Talking Moves archive is now hosted by Creative Kin.
Melanie fought hard to keep Greenwich Dance afloat, but now the organisation has closed, she sees a valuable legacy in the Talking Moves podcast.
“It means that we'll still have a voice in the sector”, she says.
“That first season… was about lockdown. And I think that's got merit in itself, just as a time capsule for what that felt like. And it (the Talking Moves podcast) has tracked us as we've moved out of that lockdown.
“I don't think any of the topics that we've talked about - women in dance, doing dance differently, working with communities, working with young people, making positive change - all these kind of subjects that we talked about, I think they will probably still stay for a while.
“So, I hope it will feel like a rich archive of conversations.”
Melanie Precious features on The Content Mavericks Club podcast, hosted by Creative Kin CEO Jason Caffrey
As the audience for podcasts continues to grow, their value as a marketing tool increases too. If you’re asking yourself if a brand podcast should be part of your content marketing strategy, you’re not alone.