I've recently got back into podcasting, having produced my first way back in 2006. My focus this time around is the Safeguarding of Children in the Digital Context, which is what the charity I run specialises in.

This is the first of a few blog entries how what podcasting is, why you should or could do it, and how to do it (I first wrote these a few years back and will update for now and adjust for charities)

Any questions, pop them into the comments.

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Content is content and the same rules or advice that you follow for blogging or Tweeting apply to a podcast. It’s all about building an audience and in the UK at least, the “hard sell” doesn’t work.

You know your charity best, indeed you should be a subject matter expert on your charity and the market in which you operate and as such you probably have opinions and comments to make about it, just as you do with your blogs and tweets. This is no different.

What is different is it’s your voice that is being used rather than the written word and at first you won’t like the sound of your voice; get used to it! You might want to listen to some podcasts to decide what kind of style you will want to use, but over time you’ll develop your own style. Many radio shows are now distributed as podcasts, but there's a lot of original content. too, such as these from Bradley Heywood. The Apollo 13 series is utterly compelling.

A half-hour may seem like a lot of time to fill but 30 minutes is a very adaptable time period as it can be broken up into a number of segments:

1 x 30 mins

2 x 15 mins

3 x 10 mins

5 x 6 mins

6 x 5 mins

10 x 3 mins

15 x 2 mins

or combinations there of.

Different sections or segments can be given over to different features - industry news, updates on projects.... get creative!

To provide added value and interest you can invite show guests to join you for an interview. Fortunately as we are effectively talking about radio then telephone or Skype-based interviews work perfectly well, so neither you nor your show guest needs to travel anywhere. You should ask you guests to sign a “release form” that gives you permission to use their voice.

In addition, most if not all industries have various trade shows and there is no reason why you cannot visit these shows and record interviews with delegates and attendees, although again release forms should be signed and permission from the event organisers should be sought beforehand; you might be treated as a member of the press!

You can include music - stings - by way of adding character to your show and there is plenty of copyright free or “‘podsafe” music for you to choose from. Ensure you observe copyright!

Planning a publication schedule is a good idea, but the nature of the medium does allow for spontaneity. Producing a podcast a month would be a great achievement.

Editing the shows is an art and science and part of the fun is the learning curve you’ll go through. Deciding what to keep in as well as what to edit out is the art of editing, making it sound good is a combination of art and science. A detailed description of how to edit is beyond the scope of this piece - the mechanics are much the same regardless of tools you use.

On the PC Audacity is a popular audio editing tool, partly because it is free and partly because it is very good. Audacity is available for Mac too, but if you have a Mac you already have a very good podcast factory called Garageband. I'll cover how to use Garageband in a future post, the same principles will apply to Audacity; after all editing audio is editing audio.

Generally you should record more than you’ll need - so if the end result is 30 mins from various sources you might need up to an hour to get at the “good stuff”. Make sure the sound capture is as good as possible by correct placement of microphones, do a sound check first and record about a minute of the ambient room noise, this can be very useful in the edit. I'll cover off the equipment you can or should use, and also how to publish and distribute your shows later.

Hope this helps, as I said earlier, any questions pop them in the comments section.