Boosting Transparency Through Podcasting at RWJF March 11, 2014

Lori Melichar is a team director at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as well as a labor economist. You can follow her on Twitter at @lorimelichar.

Listen to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneering Ideas podcast:

My day job involves finding and supporting innovations with the power to accelerate the development of a culture of health in this country. This means finding ways not only to continually expose myself to new ideas but also to clearly communicate the kinds of ideas that my employer, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), seeks to fund. Lately, I’m finding that on both counts, podcasting is one of my favorite tools.

I listen to podcasts during my daily run—newsy ones from NPR, political gabfests, cultural explorations. Sometimes I listen to TED Talks or stories from The Moth. Most of the time I listen to WTF, a podcast where Marc Maron interviews other comedians like himself.

A podcast invites a unique type of conversation-based storytelling, one that we hope will stimulate real-world conversation about applying innovation to create a culture of health—and generate some ideas we’ll be dying to fund.

Though most of the podcasts I listen to are, on the surface of things, unrelated to philanthropy, let alone health or health care, I can’t tell you the number of times that something I’ve heard in a podcast has stimulated an idea related to my work. Sometimes I have to stop running to jot down a thought, fact or idea. Sometimes a nugget from a podcast festers in my mind throughout my run and ends up somewhere completely different by the end.

I believe in the power of the podcast medium to reach individuals where it matters: between the ears. Which is why I’m thrilled to be taking the reins as the host of RWJF’s podcast, Pioneering Ideas. We launched the podcast last year and our third episode debuted earlier today (you can listen to it above).

Our goal with Pioneering Ideas is to be more transparent about the way we work and the kinds of ideas we seek to fund—and to do so in a way that’s engaging for others who are interested in exploring cutting edge ideas and emerging trends that can transform health and health care. Sometimes that means talking to program officers, grantees and others in the RWJF network; other times it means having conversations with pioneering thinkers with no formal relationship to the Foundation.

In our latest episode, for example, I interview Barry Schwartz, a former professor of mine and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, about how his work on the science of decision-making might apply to health and health care. Another guest on this episode, Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing, recently visited RWJF as part of our What’s Next Health: Conversations with Pioneers series, and graciously agreed to spend some extra time with us talking for the podcast.

Of course, our podcast isn’t the only vehicle we have for lifting the curtain on our strategy for exploring and funding cutting edge ideas—we are active across a range of social media, and are always adding and exploring new approaches. But a podcast invites a unique type of conversation-based storytelling, one that we hope will stimulate real-world conversation about applying innovation to create a culture of health—and generate some ideas we’ll be dying to fund.

We’ve been conservative in our promotion efforts so far as we find our legs with this new venture. Just over 250 people listened to our second episode—hardly a landslide, but a very respectable showing for this type of podcast. We’ve been learning a lot behind the scenes, and the feedback we’re receiving is encouraging. A variety of thought leaders in health innovation have shared the podcast with their networks, and we're hopeful that the podcast will ultimately encourage people to tell us about their ideas for health and health care. Our goal is to increase the number of listens by 20 percent with every episode we release and build a high-quality audience that excitedly awaits each episode—just as I await new episodes of WTF every Monday and Thursday morning.

I’d love to know what you think—not just about our podcast (which you can listen to at the top of this post), but about using podcasts to support idea-sourcing and to cultivate conversations that can inform a nonprofit’s efforts at creating social change. Any examples of podcasts that you think do a superlative job of communicating an organization’s interests in a stimulating and entertaining way?

On this morning’s run, I heard Marc Maron say that a philosophy teacher once told him there are two ways to fill your mind: One is to put new stuff in there, and the other is to heat up whatever’s in there so that it expands.

I hope Pioneering Ideas fills your mind.

And if you’ve got any audacious ideas for creating a culture of health in this country, I’d love to hear them. Find me on Twitter at @lorimelichar or email me at lmelichar [at] rwjf.org.

-- Lori Melichar