Why podcasting for social impact?
Social impact—changes in people’s lives due to actions by organisations or initiatives—has become a common topic in professional dialogues across various fields. Despite this awareness, professionals still struggle with defining, measuring, managing, and communicating their organisations’ impacts.
Traditional educational resources, such as university courses and handbooks, often fail to keep pace with the field’s rapid advancements. Additionally, non-formal channels like webinars often prove superficial and repetitive, prioritising promotion of the organisers over providing diverse viewpoints and meaningful learning opportunities.
Acknowledging these educational shortcomings, we have embraced podcasting, an adult education method that overcomes access barriers and creates a sense of intimacy among distant listeners, enabling the exchange of knowledge across various contexts.
Our project was designed to support the availability of quality social impact learning opportunities for adults by helping them to:
- Understand social impact topics through podcasts,
- Learn how to podcast about social impact topics.
The project activities were organised to directly support achieving the three planned project results:
Project Result 1. Compilation of Podcasts:
- Partners collaborated to finalise the topics for the podcasts, choosing those with the greatest potential to support social impact related adult education in their respective countries.
- Each partner produced a series of podcasts, including video formats, focusing on social and environmental issues to inspire and educate adult audiences. These podcasts were developed to high standards in both technical execution and content quality.
- While developing and implementing the activities related to country-specific podcast creation, the partners shared experiences and supported each other with ideas and resources, which included creating episodes in English.
Project Result 2. Compilation of Social impact podcasting tips and tricks:
- A comprehensive set of reference materials was created for social impact podcasters. These materials systematically cover everything from choosing the right format to adhering to ethical standards when dealing with sensitive topics.
Project Result 3. Guidance Material for Podcasting on Social Impact Related Topics:
- A guidance manual was developed to provide a concise resource addressing common questions from podcasters interested in social impact topics.
- The effectiveness of this guidance material, along with the reference materials, was tested during two transnational training events that involved both highly motivated beginners and experienced podcasters from all partner countries. Based on the feedback from the trainings, the materials were developed further.
The “Podcasting-Based Social Impact Learning Environment” project, co-financed by the European Union Erasmus+ Programme in cooperation partnerships for adult education, was implemented from 2021 to 2024.
This initiative was led by Stories for Impact (Estonia) inpartnership with Koç University Social Impact Forum – KUSIF (Türkiye), Geri Norai LT (Lithuania), and the Social Entrepreneurship Association of Latvia – SEAL (Latvia).
If you would like to discuss cooperation possibilities with the consortium, please get in touch with us at info@storiesforimpact.com.
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