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
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.”
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Podcasting for Non-Profit
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