Happy Anniversary 🎉 SLI Turns 1 👶
Sounds Like Impact: A newsletter for audio and action
Welcome to the one-year anniversary of Sounds Like Impact! Also, Happy 🌍 Month!
A year ago I set out to start a newsletter that would help bridge impactful audio with social change actions. I am so grateful to all 725+ of you who have joined this journey! In this edition I will have a tiny look back, as well as talk about the year ahead. I will also share some resources for Earth month! But first…
ICYMI: Last week we had a guest curation from Brenda Darden Wilkerson of B the Way Forward podcast and I interviewed Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion podcast.
SLI Coverage: Last week I was interviewed about social impact audio by Clare Wiley from The Audio Storyteller. Please check it out! And thank you Clare for the invitation.
Opportunity! The team behind Ear Hustle podcast is hiring a producer for the California Institute of Women. Applications due 4/28.
Podcast News: You can now listen to Sold A Story in Spanish! This show tells the story of how literacy is taught in the U.S. Thanks to Samantha Hodder for initially exposing me to this show with her great review and interview. Please share this podcast with any Spanish-speaker you know!
Please help me reflect on a year of Sounds Like Impact! I would love to hear from you in the comments. Are you enjoying the newsletter? What have you liked? What could be better? I want to know it all!
🙌🏾 Looking back on a year of Sounds Like Impact
So there is reflection by metrics…
13 paid subscribers at various points!
10 donations!
~50% open-rate over the past 30 days!
726 subscribers and 766 followers!
16 Guest Curations!
23 Interviews!
And there is reflection by word…
Thank you! Those are the two words that I feel like sufficiently capture how I’m feeling on this anniversary day. I really struggled to figure out what to say for this 1-year edition. What I can say is that while I don’t feel like I accomplished all I had hoped to do in the first year, I’m optimistic about what the future holds. There is so much incredible and important content out there, and I want this newsletter to continue amplifying the efforts of podcasters, writers and other social impact media makers.
🌻 What’s Next?
Publication Cadence: Starting this month, Sounds Like Impact will publish every other week. The next edition will come out 4/17. This means you can expect two newsletters a month, unless I communicate otherwise. Transparently, I work full-time now, so keeping up a weekly cadence is hard, especially when I am unsure if there is demand (I’ve tried surveying to no avail!)
Content: This newsletter will continue to feature guest curations and interviews.
Curations and Interviews: However, I myself will step back from doing as many thematic curations. Instead, I would love more folks to curate about topics that they believe we should care about, and I would especially love to receive pitches that highlight a global perspective. Please pitch!
When I don’t receive any guest curations, I may do a mini-review / spotlight of a single show I’m listening to, or share any other content I’m reading or watching that’s relevant to social issues.
CTAs: To my surprise, CTAs received the least interest from readers who responded to the feedback survey. Most folks who responded to the survey—not a huge number, but some!—said that taking action for them most looked like 1) reading about a topic, 2) watching / listening to a documentary, 3) shopping with social impact in mind, 4) donating and 5) sharing about an issue. I will keep this in mind when making recommendations.
I encourage guest curators to share CTAs with their curations, and where appropriate, I will share any I encounter whether it pertains to a curation or not.
Looking for pitch ideas? Below are some topics our audience has expressed interest in learning about. Do you have a curation you’d want to do or is your show on one of these topics? Let’s hear about it!
Environmental Causes: Sustainability, Biodiversity Conservation, Urban Planning, Transportation
Race Equity / Equality, Anti-Racism
Mass Incarceration: Prison Reform, Criminal Legal System Reform, Abolition
Disability Rights
LBGTQ+ History / Futures, Rights
Migration / Migrants
Economic Inequality: Affordable Housing
Women’s Rights
Education Access
Keep following! You can find Sounds Like Impact on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Support: This newsletter will continue to be free, but please consider advertising or donating here so that I can cover the cost of administration and hopefully plan interesting projects, like the curation series on climate reparations.
💧Earth Month Recommendations 🌱
If you read my intro post, you’ve probably heard by now that I studied International Environmental Public Health and Human Ecology. And that I got my start in podcasting on How to Save a Planet and more recently worked on the show Degrees: Real talk about planet-saving careers from the Environmental Defense Fund. Needless to say, I care about the environment. Here are some resources in the month!
Listen: The latest season of Sea Change is out now! It’s a podcast from WWNO/WRKF that dives deep into the environmental issues facing coastal communities on the Gulf Coast and beyond.
Review: Climate Film Festival compiled a list of opportunities and events to check out.
Act: Environmental CTAs from Sounds Like Impact
Learn: Have you heard of the Bechdel test? Well now, there is a test for climate in in film and television! The Climate Reality Check is a simple tool to evaluate whether our climate reality is being represented in films, TV shows, and other narratives. It's inspired by the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which measures gender representation.
Watch:
Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper (limited series)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (fiction, but adapted from book of the same title)
The Territory (documentary)
Subscribe:
Sends birthday cake to celebrate 1 year!! I have learned so much by reading and engaging in SLI newletter.
CONGRATS!!