By Richard Fawal, founder and CEO of Voxtopica
Walk the floor at any podcast conference, and you can map our industry’s priorities by what’s on the signage. Attribution. Programmatic. Dynamic ad insertion. IAB measurement compliance. CPMs and brand lift. It’s a sophisticated business, and the people building it are good at their jobs.
Now find the session for the communications director at a state health department who’s been told to launch a podcast by the end of the quarter, has no budget line for it, and will be producing it on top of running a newsletter and the social accounts. There usually isn’t one.
That individual is making a podcast, too. There are a lot of them, and our industry mostly talks past them.
I’ve spent more than a decade producing podcasts for nonprofits, universities, government agencies, advocacy groups, and associations. The people who run these shows are not hobbyists, and they are not scaled-down versions of commercial publishers waiting to grow up into ad sales. They’re professionals doing a distinct kind of work under conditions that most of our industry’s advice simply doesn’t account for.
I’d argue it’s time we made more room for them.
They’re not optimizing for the thing we measure
Almost every benchmark and best practice our industry produces assumes the goal is to grow a large audience and then to monetize it. Downloads set the rate card, and demographics determine the price of inventory. Even the necessary move beyond downloads toward a better understanding of who’s actually listening is framed in terms of commercial value.
A non-profit, mission-driven podcast isn’t playing by those rules. Its success is decided by someone near the top of an org chart who authorized the show and will decide whether it continues. The goal isn’t revenue; it’s advancing a mission, from educating a community, shifting a policy conversation, to reaching people the organization’s other channels can’t. And the constraints that inform the show’s design aren’t advertiser appeal. They’re budget, time, and institutional bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy does more damage to non-profit podcasts than people on the commercial side could ever understand. The biggest threats to a mission-driven show are almost always internal: leadership that doesn’t understand the medium well enough to make informed decisions, directors who don’t trust the team enough to let them run the show, and stakeholders who each want the show to serve their corner of the org. I’ve watched promising podcasts die not from low downloads but from internal directives that insist every episode serves a department or committee rather than an audience.
None of that shows up in a dashboard. None of it is addressed by a better attribution model. And it’s the daily reality for a huge population of working podcasters. In fact, according to the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, only 5% of nonprofit communicators say their role is understood very well by colleagues.
“Small” is not the same as “amateur”
Here’s the assumption I’d most like the industry to retire: that a show with a modest audience is a show that hasn’t succeeded yet.
For a commercial publisher, that’s often true. Scale is the point. But a public health podcast that reaches 4,000 of the right clinicians and changes how some of them counsel patients has done something a chart-topping entertainment show cannot. The value is in who’s listening and what they do next, not in the raw number.
According to research from Sounds Profitable, podcasting is the most trusted medium out there today. Mission-driven work is where that insight matters most, because trust is often the entire product.
When we treat audience size as the primary measure, we tell a whole category of skilled practitioners that their best work doesn’t count and give them the wrong vocabulary to achieve their goals. A comms director can tell her boss, “We’re up to 2,000 downloads an episode,” and a skeptical leader will ask how those downloads supported the mission. Giving her the language to demonstrate success against that goal, such as “We reached 80% of the regional providers,” gives her something the organization can value. Our industry is fluent in the first kind of reporting and nearly silent on the second.
What making room for mission-driven podcasts looks like
The rigor built into commercial podcasting has enormous value for non-profits, and I’m certainly not arguing against it. I’m simply asking us to widen our view of what makes a podcast successful.
Research that segments mission-driven and public-media-adjacent producers as a population worth understanding, not just folding them into “branded content,” would have a ready audience. Benchmarks for the metrics, such as reach within a target community, listener-reported understanding, trust over time, and actions taken, would help them measure against what they truly care about. We have gold-standard data on ad receptivity, but almost no citable data that nonprofit communication directors can hand to their executive directors to make the case for podcasting.
Proper representation for mission-driven podcasting would mean conference programming, job-board categories, and even vendor pricing that acknowledge the unique context in which these producers operate. It would mean platforms and networks that recognize the public value these organizations are providing, and create more opportunities for their shows to reach wider audiences, even when they won’t compete with “chart-toppers.”
Most of all, it would mean treating these practitioners as peers with hard-won expertise. These are hard-working people who manage to keep a show on a reliable biweekly schedule while juggling a skeptical board, a boss who wants to host but needs constant coaching, and a bevy of other stakeholders who each think the show is meant to serve them. They operate at a level of difficulty that would humble plenty of commercial producers, and they deserve to be treated with respect.
The audience is still the audience.
The reason this matters now is that listeners don’t sort podcasts the way our industry does. Someone scrolling their feed doesn’t see “commercial” and “mission-driven” categories. They see shows worth their time and shows that aren’t. A county health department’s podcast competes for the same thirty minutes as a venture-backed studio’s, and it’s held to exactly the same standard by podcast consumers.
That’s a high bar that mission-driven teams are clearing every day, often with a fraction of the resources and little of the infrastructure that dominate the discussions at podcast conferences. They are part of this industry, whether or not our industry has made space for them. The work is better, and the medium is healthier, when we act like it.
Nonprofits, universities, government agencies, advocacy groups, associations, and other mission-driven organizations have learned that podcasting brings them closer to their audiences and the missions they exist to achieve. The podcast industry should recognize the work they do and the value they provide to audiences.
Voxtopica’s Framework for Mission-driven Podcasts is designed to help anyone who works at a nonprofit, university, government agency, faith-based organization, professional association, or any organization where success is measured by mission rather than money. Get it here.
