Hot Dogs with Andy podcast

Original newsletter was only accessible via desktop.

Must be sitting or have the time to read a newsletter, making it inaccessible for driving commuters (which was identified as when employees would typically catch up on company news).

Too long, didn’t read—attention spans are extremely short today and readership was low.

The newsletters weren’t telling captivating stories that team members wanted to hear.

Impersonal format—felt like a barrier existed between leadership and employees.

To engage team members with Levy company news and create a more personal mode of communication for the CEO, I recreated the monthly newsletter as a podcast.

Step 1: I researched similar companies’ and industries’ podcasts to establish a baseline of the kinds of stories that engaged people, noted the average length of episodes that had a high numbers of listens, and heard different audio quality to understand the impact it had on listenership.

Step 2: I conducted a research session with members of different departments at Levy to gain an understanding of cross-departmental interests—learning what employees from every department wanted to hear on our podcast.

Step 3: And I conducted in-depth research into podcast software and equipment, learning how to use both in order to record, edit, and fully produce the podcast.

Step 4: After the research and initial testing phases, I worked with the CEO to help him become comfortable becoming a podcast host and we were off and running. I wrote, recorded, and produced Hot Dogs with Andy every month, and after only a few episodes we were already seeing an average listenership of 250 listens per episode.