Relaunching the FSU Navigators Podcast

Last week I tweeted to John Saddington, the senior editor of the website ChurchCrunch.com, that I was using Posterous to create a podcast for the FSU Navigators campus ministry. ChurchCrunch looks at how web technology can be used effectively by churches and other ministries. It’s become one of my favorite sites on the web, having passed along a lot of valuable advice and knowledge to me. John messaged me back with a lot of enthusiasm and asked me to write a guest post for ChurchCrunch about how I was using Posterous to host the podcast so he could blog about it. That post and this one are almost identical, but I do recommend you visit John’s site. I also encourage you to check out the new FSU Navigators podcast (and subscribe to it in iTunes).

I thought I’d tell you exactly what I told John, since all this work I’ve done on the podcast relaunch has been done very quietly up until now.

I’ve been working with the Navigators at Florida State University in one form or fashion for about 7 years now. I’d only been involved for a month or two, back when I was a college freshman, when I was put in charge of maintaining the ministry website. As the social web has blossomed, I’ve led the charge directing our overall web presence.

Why a Podcast?

I want to first address why we even have a podcast. The FSU Navs use Facebook and email lists to communicate and organize on a week-to-week basis, while we use our website to introduce who we are and what we believe to those not involved. So the site includes a statement of faith, profiles of our staff and ways to contact them, and a very general overview of what we’re doing that semester. I’ve always tried to include photos and video clips on the site as well, but without specific context a lot of that type of media loses its value. It’s the “I guess you had to be there” problem. But it dawned on me two years ago that a podcast could be a great way to share who we are with the public. My vision is to record each message given by our staff at our weekly large-group meeting (sometimes also a student testimony or a talk given at a state-wide Navigator conference) and share those on our site. You want to know what we’re all about? This is exactly what we’re teaching!

Painless Podcasting

My goal has always been for this podcast to be as painless as possible to create and maintain. We record using an iKEY Plus, which plugs right in to our powered mixer and lets us record straight to a flash drive (no computer needed, just plug it in and hit record). I happen to have Adobe Soundbooth to edit, but if editing falls to someone else I set them up with the free open source program Audacity.

Then there’s the matter of getting the files online. Originally I uploaded the files via FTP to our server space and used Odeo to get those files into a feed to which people could subscribe. This always seemed like the clunky step in the process, and it was always the hardest to try to explain to someone else. I wanted to find a way to simplify this step.

This is where Posterous comes in. I was recently on their blog when I came across a post describing how you could podcast by email. All you have to do is attach an MP3 to an email and send it to your Posterous email address. Posterous will host the file for you and provide you with a feed. What could be easier? Everyone has and knows how to use email. Now that I’ve set up the account, all I need to do is authorize the sender’s email address and they’ll be able to add files. (And, in a stroke of good timing, Gmail recently bumped their max attachment size from 20MB to 25MB, allowing me to upload audio that’s a little higher in quality.) One other thing I really like is that Posterous lets you set up a custom domain address. Our podcast can be found at http://podcast.fsunavigators.org/.

Right now there are only five episodes up, all of them from the spring 2008 semester. But I hope to get some newer content online in the next couple weeks. Let me know what you think of the new podcast in the comments.