March of the pod people

When Jack Guynn, then president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, spoke at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Buckhead (Atlanta), the Bloomberg News Service set up a live feed of the speech.

That got club member Brennan Robison thinking.

“It planted the seed that what our speakers say might be newsworthy,” he says. “I had done podcasts in my career as a public relations consultant, and I thought this was a good opportunity to utilize the tool on our expanding Web site.” Robison proposed creating podcasts of speakers at club meetings.

A podcast, which takes its name from the Apple iPod, is a digital broadcast distributed through the Internet. Podcasts can be streamed online or downloaded to portable MP3 players. Podcasting technology shows promise for a range of goals, from education to outreach, and Rotary clubs are beginning to take advantage of it.

The Buckhead club decided to use podcasting to draw attention to the quality of its speakers. “We want to position the club as being relevant and newsworthy,” Robison says. “We have outstanding speakers at our weekly meetings, and there’s always a possibility that they might make news in their presentations.”

The club posted its first podcast at www.buckheadrotary.com in June 2007. It decided to present only speakers that might also appeal to nonmembers, such as football coach and analyst Bill Curry, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, and Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A. Robison, who manages the club’s newsletter as well as the podcasts, has a background in broadcast media; he edits the recordings to include a musical intro and voiceover.

The Rotary Club of Kansas City, Mo., on the other hand, records its meetings gavel-to-gavel as a member service, says club Webmaster David McCaughey. To capture the full effect of the meetings, he puts his MP3 recorder on the table where he’s sitting. “You get a lot of the table noise, but we wanted the podcast to be like you’re in the meeting,” he explains.

The club, which is also known as Rotary 13, has close to 400 members, and the podcasts (listen at www.rotary13.org) can be used as make-ups for missed meetings. In addition, says McCaughey, the full-meeting recordings are archived.

McCaughey was inspired to try podcasting after reading about the Long Beach Rotary Club, which made podcasts of a yearlong series of classes called the Long Beach Rotary 101 Course. Based on the book A Century of Service, classes were designed to help new members become integrated into Rotary and were taught by past club presidents, says John Graham, assistant to the club president.

The classes are posted at www.rotarylongbeach.org (click on “Media”). Much of the content is specific to the Long Beach club, Graham says, but the club has created an informational package for other clubs wanting to create their own course.

The classes, which can be used as make-ups, are also used “to reach out to new, younger members,” Graham says, “and they’re a way to interact with other Rotary clubs throughout the world.” People in 17 countries have downloaded at least part of the series.

For Rotary, the potential of podcasting is vast – for public relations, for fundraising, for membership – and Robison believes Rotarians will embrace the technology. “I get constant positive feedback about the podcasts,” he says.