46: One Year of the Meet HOPE Podcast!

Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope.

Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online.

We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others.

Welcome to Hope.

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Meet Hope podcast.

This is kind of a special episode at least I think it's special because we are celebrating one year of our podcast.

So Ashley Black is with me.

Ashley is our podcast producer for this past year, producing every episode, right, ashley?

Yeah, it's been really exciting yeah.

I sit in on every single one that we do.

So this is one year, another anniversary for Hope.

This is our one year anniversary.

We like to celebrate things.

Why?

is that such an important milestone for us?

It's an important milestone because it's something I discovered when we first started doing a podcast.

You know, when we talked about wanting to do one, I started looking into like well, how will we know that we want to keep doing it?

How do we know it's being successful?

And a couple things I learned from reading some podcast articles is a lot of podcasts start out real strong, real gung-ho, and they don't make it past 20 episodes.

I think it's because people have a great idea and they realize the work that goes into it, and then also that a lot of podcasts don't get more than like 25 listeners, and so we've surpassed both of those.

So, that's exciting.

We'll talk about that in a little while.

It's a good metric, right, Because today we're this is episode number 46.

46, yeah, and while we're doing a one-year anniversary.

46 doesn't equal 52, but that's because we started every other week and then quickly turned into an every week thing.

You remember that?

too right?

Yes, I do, because I was the one that was like, hey, I think we should just do every other week to start.

I don't know that we know what we're getting ourselves into Like I just want to be, you know, careful.

And then I remember saying to you guys like I'm nervous to say this, but I think we could do it every week and we have it's really awesome and really great, and so I love that we do it so consistently.

And of course I was ready to just jump into the deep end of the pool and say, yeah, let's do it.

So, in our running past the 20 episode mark, what have we learned?

First thing I would say is it's been a lot of fun.

It is.

I have so much fun.

I get excited every episode.

There hasn't been an episode where I'm like I have to sit there and listen.

You know, like I, I have so much fun.

It's just such an honor to sit in and listen to people share their stories.

And yeah, it's just it, the process is a lot of fun.

Yeah, that's what I enjoy.

I enjoy the topics, I enjoy the stories.

Yeah, it's fun getting to know people in this kind of an atmosphere and it's been fun playing with the new technology, right.

Yeah, we, yeah, for people that don't know, we've, we've been in a couple of places as we've tried to figure this out.

We've moved around right and for the first I don't know first, 15 or 20, at least we were in my office and I I shoved a table and some chairs and and microphones that were lent to us from the worship team into my office and we did our best to, you know, soundproof it and and record in there and I had to.

it was a bit crowded.

It was a bit crowded.

Yeah, the times that we've had like four guests, it was a lot of people.

I had to move my desk back, Like I had to, you know.

But we made it work and then, you know, once we kind of started to feel like, hey, this is the thing we want to keep doing.

We don't have a dedicated podcast studio which is exciting.

If you're in the building, it's down the hallway.

It's right next to the chapel.

Most people haven't even noticed it's there, but we have a recording late outside we even have a recording late.

It makes us that makes us real.

Yes, If you see it on, you can know that we're in there recording a podcast and we have a legit, you know podcast mics now and we're, and everything stays set up, which is my favorite part.

So then we can just come right in and record and come right in at it, and that just makes it so much more possible to do it weekly.

Right, yeah, we're just.

We're built for success.

Yeah, yeah, we're doing our best.

Yeah, and that's important because during one of our first I think it might have been our first podcast, pastor Jeff and I were together and we talked about why would we do a podcast, and we talked about three things, and I think those three three reasons are still this are still valid for the year ahead.

Is that, first, it's a broadcast approach.

This is a chance for us to create content that's accessible and available, so it's an easy invite for us to invite others to listen.

It's a great first step for someone who maybe even someone who doesn't come to church, but they still could listen to an episode.

Yeah, yeah, that's why we try to do such a wide variety of topics so that, even if the church thing feels makes you nervous, you might want to listen to one about finance or mental health or family.

Yeah, and it's why, you know, I always say if you enjoy listening, tell other people, because it's a good way to connect others to our community here at Hope.

So it's a broadcast approach.

The second is that it's also really personal, and while we said that in the first episode, I'm realizing how personal it is because not only do we get to tell so often we tell stories from the platform on Sunday morning, but now those same people, the stories that we tell, they can tell their story.

Yeah, that's what I love about it is, like I mentioned a little bit ago, it's such a privilege to sit in this space and have someone be willing to come in and share their story, and because it becomes intimate really quickly and what I what I love about it is that you know you find out something about someone that might take you five or six conversations for them to share that with you, but because we're talking about a specific topic, you know you learn more about people's stories more quickly and we've always like kind of talked about, you know we, we all hear stories as a staff.

Many of us have the honor of you.

You know people who are listening, sharing your stories with us, and we often are like, oh, I wish so, and so I wish everybody else could hear their story, because it would just inspire their faith, and so this has really met that need of getting to do that.

Yeah, so it's, and we're looking forward to the chance to tell more stories and then and then.

The third reason and I think this is still valid as well is it allows us to address material or topics that we couldn't do in another venue.

So sometimes there's things that we need to talk about or things that are happening in our world and they may not fit in a Sunday morning or they might not even fit in like a written form, but our podcast gives us a venue to discuss it, and you know so, things like faith, family, what's happening at Hope and what's happening in our world, all those things that it's just been a great vehicle, I think, for us as a community.

Yeah, what I hear often from people is they love how conversational it is.

And so just getting.

I think it just matters so much when you get to hear other people just have a conversation about something and then you feel like you can do it too.

Yeah, yeah.

So tell us some stats then about those listeners, so so we know that we have some regular listeners.

Tell us about them.

Yeah, so we know that we have about 65 regular listeners.

That we know.

So we we see how many downloads happen per episode and so that's about where we land, which is really encouraging, and and the cool thing for me is that every time we release a new episode, I watch those download numbers go up for every other episode, and so what I'm assuming happens is someone listens and then they look back and they say oh well, I also am interested in this one and this one, and so they check that out and you know, our goal has always been that they're.

They're on the 15 to 20 minute side because we want them to be easily consumable, and so, um yeah, that's been really exciting.

Yeah, and measuring attendance is always a hard thing, with digital, and so the way we do that is by measuring downloads, which is and what.

So what's exciting is that over the last year, we've had 3,800 downloads.

Yeah, so that's a lot of listens.

It's crazy.

Yeah, it's exciting, it's really it's been very exciting, and we know that most people we can see where they listen, and so most people we know they listen through Apple podcasts, um, through that podcast app, or also, second is on our website, yeah, so, um, those are both really great places to listen to.

You can also listen to us in in any podcast app that you might use, so if you have a friend that does something different, like it's available to them.

Yeah, and what's great about about those for us is that we love when people go to our website yeah and uh, because that that's a great, great way for us to introduce people to hope.

And then we love when people use Apple uh, because if you are a listener on Apple, we want to encourage you to give us a rating, and we would love if you gave us a five star rating.

Uh, because that's how Apple determines what people listen to.

So if people are searching for content.

Uh, if the more ratings you have, the more likely it is that you'll be in that search results.

So if you are a listener on Apple, please give us a five star.

Yeah, definitely, it's very easy to do and just it makes it even more possible for people to find us what's been some of our most popular episodes this past year.

So some of our most popular have actually been ones where we've interviewed different staff members about themselves.

Those always take off with downloads, and I think some of that is that our staff they're really dedicated to their work and they do a great job, and they don't often have a space where they're sharing a lot about themselves, because they're trying to encourage and support others, and I so.

I think it's been fun to get to hear them share their stories, whether it's how they came to faith or how they came to their job, or learning funny tidbits about them that we wouldn't know otherwise.

Like I'll never forget, I learned like live as we're recording.

I learned that Christie's brother works on Broadway, and I would have never asked her about that, you know.

so those kind of things, and fun facts too.

Yeah, those are some of my favorite episodes too.

I've loved learning things.

I've also learned about different places to eat nearby.

Yes, I should just do a post where we share, like every local place, because I love like that, we, I love supporting, you know, our local community, and so it's a great way to do that, and also I really like food, so yeah and so.

so what's nice about when we talk about our favorite episodes?

In January, we're going to be re-sharing our top three episodes from the past year.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's the plan.

So we're going to start out the year with our top three episodes, and part of that is to highlight what you are listeners really have enjoyed, and that way, if there's someone who's newer to listening, they get a chance to check those out too.

And then, also, going into the new year, we have some other exciting things that we'll be doing, so we've started to do them.

We've started to do a couple of episodes, some that are like more educational, informative.

We've been calling them Monday school, and so we've done one about you know how to read your Bible, or we're going to be doing one about what is Advent, and that really came out of.

Every once in a while, I get together with some people who I know listen and ask them for their thoughts and input, because we want to serve our listeners.

Yeah, I think those regular roundtable discussions that you have with listeners are really valuable because we get to find out what is it.

Yeah, we're interested in hearing.

Yeah, so that came out of this and and also some more like behind the scenes, like how we do things at Hope, and then also, obviously, more stories.

You know that's the place that I think most people really connect and relate to is hearing other people's stories.

You know that's been some of my favorite episodes have been.

One of my favorite series we did was called Faith and and people shared their stories around finance and family and mental health and so yeah, yeah, that's true, and one of my I mean I shared with this earlier rehearsal that my favorite interview and I've done a lot of these interviews over the last year was with Jeff MacArella and Scott Cruz and we talked about Grace and we talked about growing in our faith and actually I know this changed how we do podcasting, because during that episode, when we were finished is this was when we were still in your office and we ended up talking about 30 minutes afterward and we continued the conversation and we weren't recording.

We just continued the conversation and it was some really good material and one of us said we should have been recording this.

Yeah, you guys went for a while and it was.

It was such a joy to hear those stories continue and part of that was because it gave those people who were sharing a chance to talk through more of their story.

But then also for me as the producer, it actually impacted the way that we, that we produce and record and so you know, we, when we first started out, you know we're a little nervous, we want to do it right, and so we would kind of prep and then we would say, okay, we're recording, and then we would record, and then we'd be done.

But we really shifted to more like I hit the record button much sooner, even before we're, like you know, fully like ready to go, because it just we found that that you know that we don't want to miss any of those really great conversations that might come up before or after the main conversation.

Yeah, Maybe.

Maybe at our fifth year anniversary we can do like an outtakes.

Yeah, I have some really encouraging outtakes and also have some really funny outtakes, so we could do a little bit of both, yeah, so that'd be good yeah.

So you know.

So we're excited about our moving into our second year.

We plan to continue discussing what's been happening currently, both in our world and our neighborhoods and our families, as well as speak with members of our hope community and staff and others.

And really I think we could end with one more.

Why to the podcast?

So I did reference it at the front end, but I feel it's just so important that this podcast is such an easy invite.

It's such a way for us to inspire people in our hope community and also hope that these episodes are worthy to be shared with someone you know.

Yeah, yeah.

So we just want the material to be relatable.

Relatable.

Accessible.

Yeah, that's what I love about it is it's so easy.

It's so easy, after you listen to an episode, to like, text the link to a friend and say, hey, I know you're having a hard time, you know, with your kid right now here's someone who talked about that in their life, Even if they don't go to church or churches, you know.

It's so non-threatening, and that's what I love about what we try to do with all of our digital components trying to be a church of.

You know two expressions, and it's that you know you can.

We can watch worship online or you can listen to a podcast, and those are both great ways to find a way into a faith community.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think I think we're done, ash, yeah, and it's been fun and we're going to keep going.

It's been so, yeah, I can't wait to keep going.

Yeah, all right, let's do year two, and so thanks listeners, thanks for being a part of this conversation and thanks for being part of the Meet Hope podcast, and so have a great day.