Your best stories are probably buried somewhere.

It hasn't rained much since Christmas. On our farm in central Kansas, that is not a minor inconvenience. 

Over the past two months we reworked our fertilizer strategy because the kerfuffle with Iran sent prices skyrocketing. The wheat is running four weeks ahead of schedule because it has been so warm. That’s not a bad thing on its own, but a smaller crop than we'd hoped because the ground has been so dry. Right now we are waiting on rain so we can plant corn. 

Farm policy touches all of it: the fertilizer markets, the crop insurance, what next season looks like. These are not abstractions in our house. They are Tuesday. 

So when I spent the better part of the last few days helping the Barry Flinchbaugh Center for Ag and Food Policy get their podcast content about the Farm Bill in front of the right people, I had a personal interest. 

In January, they added a podcast to their communications plan. 

Before I tell you what we did with it this week, I want to say something about podcasts in general — because I think there is a widespread misconception about their role in the nonprofit world. 

Podcasts are sexy right now. Boards love proposing them. They feel modern, credible, like a real platform.  

And they can be all of those things. But here is what I have observed working with nonprofits: almost none of them break through a handful of listens.  

Building a podcast audience is genuinely hard. It’s akin to starting a YouTube channel and expecting to become a star overnight. It takes years, and it requires a very different strategy than most nonprofits have the capacity to execute. 

Nonprofits generally aren’t trying to monetize their podcast—they’re trying to spread information. So the standard measures (downloads, subscribers, growth rate) are mostly beside the point. And yet those are exactly the numbers boards ask about, which sets up a quiet sense of failure around something that was never supposed to win that way. 

The better question is not whether to start a podcast. It is what a podcast makes possible that you could not do as consistently without it. 

For the Flinchbaugh Center, the answer to that question was clear. They are a young organization still building their body of research and published work. They needed a regular, disciplined way to generate something credible and substantive — a mechanism that would bring in experts, create a real conversation, and give them something worth distributing on a consistent basis. 

The podcast is not their product. It is their content engine. 

That is a meaningful distinction. And once you name it, the next question — “How do we promote it?” — has a much cleaner answer. 

This week’s episode was about the Farm Bill. They recorded Friday and wanted it out immediately because legislative action is happening in Congress this week.  

The 5-person discussion was genuinely great. Real insight from people who have spent careers inside this process. 

And then came the question: how do we promote the podcast? 

The first thought is to post the link, write a caption, maybe send an email. Watch the episode. Listen here. Check out the replay. 

Unfortunately, most of your audience doesn’t. For those who do, the majority will drop off after the first few minutes. 

Let’s run the math. An email list of 2,500 people. A 30% open rate means 750 people saw it. A 3% click rate (which by industry standards is exceptionally good) means roughly 75 people went any further. And of those, most won't make it past the first few minutes of a 45-minute conversation. 

Now compare that to turning the podcast discussion into a policy briefing email. Same list. Same 30% open rate. But now 750 people actually consumed the information. Not a link to it. They didn't have to commit 45 minutes. 

And to be clear — a list of bullets recapping what was covered is not the same thing. That is still asking the audience to do the work. The goal is to extract the full story and give them something complete enough to read on its own. 

The central insight from the Flinchbaugh conversation was not “listen to our Farm Bill podcast.” They want people to know that the process for making farm policy has fundamentally changed — pushing short-term fixes ahead of longer-term policy design, and widening the gap between what farmers actually need and what the policy framework provides. 

That idea became a policy briefing blog/email, social posts with a key points carousel, and a YouTube short linking to the full episode. 

I know this list looks overwhelming to a small staff. The point is not to do all of it. The point is that the idea deserved more than a link and a caption, and even one or two of those formats would have gotten it further. 

The full episode is still there for anyone who wants to go deeper. But the ideas inside it are no longer dependent solely on someone who prefers a podcast format to hit play. 

Many organizations are already doing the hard part: recording the conversation, hosting the webinar, running the panel. The insight is often genuinely useful. What gets skipped is the earlier question: not which format to choose, but what that format is supposed to make possible. 

When you can answer that, the distribution strategy stops being an afterthought. 

On our farm, the Farm Bill is not daily entertainment. It is part of how we plan. We actually need that information placed in our hands. And when zero of the three farmers in our operation are podcast consumers, assuming they’ll find it on Spotify is risky business indeed. 

We are still waiting for rain. A dance may be in order. 

(That curious little guy in the photo is now 11 with feet bigger than mine.) 

Lori