Podcasts, outreach and climate advocacy
By Ankita Arora, North Denver Chapter
Have you heard of the podcast How to Save a Planet? If you’re concerned about climate change and want to know what we can do about it, this podcast is for you. Several CCLers took it to the next level when they independently emailed the hosts of the podcast, journalist Alex Blumberg and scientist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, and suggested that they should do an episode on carbon pricing.
“Whether our emails affected that or not, I have no idea, but certainly I think it did move the bar ever so slightly more in that direction”, said Steven Moses, the lead of Colorado’s new cross-chapter Podcast team. If he had to shoot for the stars, he thinks it would be pretty incredible for CCL’s V.P of Government Affairs Danny Richter or Executive Director Mark Reynolds to be interviewed on a huge national podcast like Freakonomics Radio.
The Podcast initiative was started by Dan Palken and Kelsey Grant, from the Boulder chapter. They had an extensive series of interviews with various podcasts, and Dan had this big spreadsheet where he listed a bunch of podcasts that he had done outreach to. When Dan accepted a Congressional fellowship in Washington D.C., he had to take off his CCL hat and this left a void on the Podcast team.
This is when Steven stepped in as the lead of the Podcast initiative and turned it into a cross-chapter team by having discussions with the Denver and the Colorado Springs chapters. “My goal with the Podcast team is not to create our own podcast as CCL already has a podcast, but rather to reach out to existing podcasts and radio stations and then try to get them to interview us,” Steven said.
One of the team’s success stories has been landing an interview with the Peak Environment podcast in Colorado Springs, where Steven, Don Parcher, a retired Navy pilot, and Nate Hochman, a Colorado College senior and CCL Conservative Outreach Fellow, spoke about why conservatives should care about climate change and how CCL’s carbon fee and dividend fits into that.
“My motivation for reaching out to a Colorado Springs podcast was that it's more conservative there, and I thought that we may be able to reach a more conservative audience than we have in Boulder,'' Steven said.
The other thing that Steven has been working on is listening to a lot more podcasts focused on the environment and then trying to find ways to contact them for interviews or featuring an episode on carbon pricing.
Steven says, “The struggle with the podcasts we’ve been reaching out to is that we’re probably not going to get a response, but it does check some box somewhere saying that our listeners are interested in this topic and they do keep in mind the requests while coming up with future episodes.”
Take Action
Contact Steven Moses if you’d like to be involved with the Colorado CCL’s new Podcast team and grab your chance to share your story and how your chapter is taking steps to address climate change.
Resource – CCL National’s podcast