Welcome to Podcasting 101, Part 3 – A case study

Image by Csaba Nagy from Pixabay

By Mark G. Auerbach

(Editor’s note: You can read Part 1 of this series here and Part 2 here.)

Dramatic Health is a New York City based national company that tells stories of real people in the frontlines and behind-the-scenes in the healthcare field. Doctors, nurses, researchers, therapists, patients, and families are profiled in imaginative videos that educate and inspire. Its CEO and co-founder, Sean Moloney, had the courage to tell his own story about his fight with a rare cancer, which prompted me to profile him in Succeeding in Small Business.

I’ve been following Dramatic Health’s growth because Sean and I go way back. He co-founded an arts and entertainment weekly, The Valley Optimist, which covered Western Massachusetts, and I was one of the paper’s arts reporters. Sean had opened a marketing company while I was doing the public relations for NPR member station WFCR, now New England Public Radio. We collaborated on several projects including a live performance of Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion at The University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center, and the international Anne Frank exhibit at The Children’s Museum in Holyoke, MA. We’ve mentored each other and been good friends for over 25 years.

Sean and his Dramatic Health team are developing a podcast, Game Changers in Medicine, which goes beyond their work telling current stories in healthcare. Moloney describes himself as a storyteller, whose grandfather, Dr. William C. Moloney, was a hematologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of medicine in Boston. “He also told stories about health focused on his patient care, research, WWII and post-WWII assignments and his life-long pursuit to establish hematology as a recognized specialty,” says Moloney.

In the new podcast series, Moloney hopes “to capture medical history anecdotes with physicians who founded new discoveries, either helped establish or contribute to the foundation of modern medicine, and, if only serendipitously, created new cures and treatment.”

Moloney adds, “Although it’s hard to measure how our health has improved over the course of history, the trend lines tell a far better story than the headlines. Our lifespan has increased about 50 years since the Iron Age, while newborns today are 20 times more likely to make it to the age of 1 than they were a100 years ago. At the same time mothers today are almost 50 times more likely to survive childbirth than they were a century ago…History is littered with individuals who over the decades have combined their curiosity and creativity with the scientific method and a healthy dose of serendipity to solve humanities grand challenges. This is their story…our game changers in medicine!”

Moloney serves as executive producer, and the series, and the podcasts will be hosted by Dr. Rubin Pillay, professor of Medicine and Business, assistant dean for Global Health Innovation, School of Medicine, and chief innovation officer at UAB Health System at University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The podcast will compliment Dramatic Health’s existing programs and services, broaden its audience, and hopefully position Dramatic Health more uniquely in the marketplace. Game Changers in Medicine will premiere on June 1, airing monthly at first, and then moving towards a bi-monthly schedule. Dramatic Health will market the series through its website and social media platforms.

For details on Dramatic Health and the upcoming podcast Game Changers in Medicine.

The take away

Dramatic Health developed its podcasts with a mission and a plan, using its own resources and talents to maintain its position as a front-runner in the market. A well-planned podcast, with a fully realized and conceptualized mission, can stand out amongst the thousands of others.

Dramatic Health understands the concept of story telling. A podcast is essentially, a story. One can use storytelling to educate and inform, and entertain…it’s not a platform for just dispensing information like a white paper; it’s a forum that informs while capturing someone’s attention—and keeps them involved. That’s entertainment.

Good concept, good planning, and a good format positions a podcast for success.

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Mark G. Auerbach is principal at Mark G. Auerbach Public Relations, a Springfield, MA, based marketing, public relations, development and events consultancy. You can find more information about Mark at Facebook and LinkedIn. Mark also produces ArtsBeat in print in The Westfield News, on radio for Pioneer Valley Radio and 89.5fm/WSKB, and on TV at WCPC15.

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