Podcasting in a Natural Disaster

Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast, answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right. This episode is no different. We are going to be talking tonight a little bit about what happens when you are in a natural disaster area. So talking a little bit about things like we've seen tornadoes, we've seen hurricanes

lately. And so I wanted to chat a little bit about that. And talking about what you should do if you are in the hurricane area, because you never know when your podcast may be interrupted

and you don't want to lose your audience. So that being said, what are the very, very, very first thing that I'm going to have you do and I think you should do is you should try and update your audience, the cell phone may not work, you may not be able to get to your cell phone, your cell phone may not have service, you may not have battery at your house. So the very first thing that I think that you should be doing is somehow updating

your audience. If that means just a quick update via social media, that means a quick update via social media. But it may also mean that you are able to send out an actual episode. So we'll talk a little bit about that on this episode today. But you may not have service at your house to get anything out to them. So one of the good things that you can do is listen to the radio or talking to others, you might be able to find some service somewhere.

I know some people who were in the latest hurricane, and they were able to talk to people and they were saying that the radio, the actual radio waves were actually a really good help in the hurricane because they were able to, they were able to actually hear where people had different things that they had, they were able to say, Okay, this is where you can find cell services where you can find internet service. And so they were able to actually

go about doing that. And so hopefully, you're able to do that talking to other people, you might be able to find a glimpse of where there might be an actual good internet service for you to be able to go out and update your your listeners. So hopefully, you have an email list that you can send emails out to. So if you don't have an email list, email lists are super important. They are ways that you can go ahead and, and have your your list,

you know, your subscribers subscribe. And the great thing is, it doesn't have to be just trying to sell something you can say, Hey, remember, we're going live tomorrow. And we would love to have you join. And so that that is one way that you can that you can, or one good thing about an email list is you can see when people you can have people join you can do that. So you have a way to contact your people if all else fails. An

email is quick, and it can get pretty, it's pretty small. And so it doesn't take a lot of internet. So hopefully, you have an email list. If not definitely start one today. But send it out an email, send out updates to social media, just some sort of a quick Hey, this is what's going on. I'm in the middle of a natural disaster. I have no internet

right now. So updates are going to be late, you don't want to let your people hang. So that's really the key here is you don't want your, your listeners, you don't want them to be able to lose track of what you're doing. You don't want them to be just left hanging

without an episode, especially if it could be two, three weeks. And if you're putting out an episode every week, then that could be something where you need to just put out your quick episode and say, Hey, I'm going to be out of commission for just a little

bit because of this natural disaster that's going on. And so you can send out your emails, your social medias, let people know what's going on, tell them the details, you know, that you may not make some upcoming episodes because of this, you don't know when your power is going to come back on, things like that. It could be also good to have a friend in another location with access to your social media, slash email slash hosting provider.

So by that, I mean, have a trusted person in in the area. So you know, obviously may not be you, or it wouldn't be you, but somebody else may be in a different state that you trust that you can say, Hey, john, I really need you to log into my social media, and let people know that it's going to be okay, that I'm just going to be out for a little bit because I am I'm having a natural disaster in my area. And so I really need you to go

ahead and contact my, my social media group, my email group, or whatever. And maybe even a way to put out a small episode, you could even have a pre recorded episode saying, Hey, this is I'm not able to put my this episode out because of the fact that that I've got this, this natural disaster going on. And so you can have your trusted friend put those things out for you. That way, you can still get your episode out, your people can still

listen to what they're going to be listening to. And they can still, they can still know that you're still alive and that you're not going to be going anywhere and that, you know, you're are coming back and things like that. So that's probably the easiest best thing is if you can have your trusted friend, again, in another location, another area that has

the keys to the kingdom, if you will. And again, maybe they're not putting out the whole episode, maybe they're not, maybe they're not going to be doing everything for you, but they can at least update your social media saying, Hey, this show won't be out for you know, an who knows, because we've actually got a natural emergency going on and things like that. So another good thing to do is pre plan for your emergency episodes. So you

can do that in a couple different ways. And the one thing is you can batch record episodes. So pre record several episodes to have a backlog that you can release in case an emergency arises, upload them to your podcast host platform with schedule, you probably wouldn't want to do scheduled release dates now, because you don't know when that's going to happen. But you can have it ready to go and uploaded to your media host and then just set as like

a draft episode. And then in this case, you have an episode ready to go. And then you can ask your friend in the other state, no john, hey, go in, release these episodes for me because I'm not going to make it and I don't know when I'm going to make it so batch

recording episodes. And again, this helps really, if you have evergreen content, meaning that your content is something that's going to be good no matter when you listen to it when you because some some episodes if you're doing like a news episode, that's going to get stale pretty quickly because it could could get stale pretty quickly because you don't know the news may be going may, you know, the news may be stale news by the time

you go and actually get your episode place because you're batch recording all these episodes. But you can use evergreen content record content that isn't going to be time sensitive. So it can be used at any point. So this could some examples like this are q&a sessions, like best of highlights or other educational segments that don't have a timeframe on them.

I like the q&a sessions because those are good. All the time, you can go back and listen to those because you're gonna say, Hey, you know, these are some questions that you the listeners have, and here we're going to answer them. So some other things that that are just good general kind of preparedness to have when you are going to be talking about things in an emergency. So having alternative power sources, so I like portable battery banks.

And if you are not familiar with them, they're just a battery bank that you can plug in your phone into invest in a high capacity power bank for your phone and possibly even your small recording equipment. I know for me, the roadcaster Pro does allow me to power it by a battery bank, it has to be a specific battery bank, and it has to be a specific power delivery that it's going to be delivering, but I can actually power the roadcaster on

on that. And so I would be able to actually record an episode. Now, I wouldn't be able to do all of the video and all of the other stuff that I'm doing right now. But I would be able to actually get by and do it do an episode, I would be able to actually record

an episode and possibly even release it. So portable battery banks are key, I would have two or three of those around, have them charged up, use them now you're going to want to use them because if they just charged up, they will kind of go bad and you don't want to do that. So use your power banks, you might have to refresh them every year, get new ones every year. So you have these powder power, portable power banks that you can use and

the charger small things like cell phones, because you can use minimal equipment. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But you can use minimal equipment to record your episode and that would include things like your cell phone. And so you can do that with your portable battery banks now also invest in a solar charger. They're a great option for extended outages and you don't you never know how long you're going to be at without

power. It may just be a couple hours, it may be a few days, it may be a few weeks. So solar, solar chargers. Now, I'm going to cost you a little bit I know that there are some portable power banks that actually have solar chargers in them. I would recommend staying away from those because the solar panels that are in those are not going to be high enough capacity that it would take you several days if not several weeks to actually charge them back

up. You can get a larger solar panel and it can be still kind of portable. I have one that's like eight and a half by 11 like a sheet of paper but then that folds out into like four different five different panels. And it has a USB C on the back of it and I can actually just plug my chargers into that and charge my battery banks back up. So that's great in combination with the portable power banks because you it allows you to actually

have that charge those back up once you've depleted them. And it can take a whole day to do that. But the whole day, you can have your battery bank plugged in, then at night plug your phone in, charge your phone back up. And you're not without power on your phone, which is great, not even just for your podcast, because it is good to have be able to use those small equipment to put out your podcast. But it's also good to in case you get stuck

where you can actually still communicate. Now I know some of the newer newer iPhones can communicate via satellite. So that's that's also good. But it's those things that will help you stay in contact that will help you be able to do this. So the last thing is is

getting a backup generator. So you can have a gas powered generator, whether that be your whole house generator or just a small, you know, gas one that can power things for a little while, that'll allow you to at least keep up your keep up your your things like your refrigerator and things like that. But it'll also allow you to charge those portable power banks. And then you can go ahead and get that your equipment back up and running.

Now one of the things that is kind of important to note is if your cell phone is if there's no service in the area, the best thing you can do is actually go into airplane mode, because then you will actually save your battery longer because if you're if you're your cell tower is on if it's not in airplane mode, it's going to actually try and go out and search for a signal. And if it can't find one, it's going to keep doing that and that

radio actually uses a lot of power. And so you actually if you're not connected to a cell tower, delete it, turn it off, go to airplane mode. So that way you don't end up using all of your power for that. And so with you go into airplane mode, your phone can actually last for a long time, especially you can do that. And then you'll check again in an hour or two hours to see if you have if you have service again, and then you can

go off of airplane mode. And you'll be able to actually then use your phone. Now I did mention recording using minimal equipment. And so you can use your smartphone or your tablet to record directly to your phone if you can't access your regular setup. So for me, I have a roadcaster Pro that I'm using here with my mic and anyway, it allows me to do my music and things like that. But this, you don't have to do that, especially if you're

putting out an emergency episode where you're just trying to get an update. So for instance, for the podcast that I was listening to earlier, where the one co host was without power, she was in North Carolina, and, and didn't have power or cell phone signal or whatever, all of that, she used her voice memo and was able to get up to the one location in town that had a little tiny bit of internet, and was able to upload that over to to their other

co host that then they could bring that into the show. And so at least that their listeners got an update from her where she was at what she was doing and how she she was actually surviving and things like that. So you can use your smartphone or your tablet to record directly into that. And you can do that simply with using your your your built in mic on your on your computer or on your phone, as well as the voice memos app that works really

well. And so you can you can just use the voice memo app, it can do short episodes or updates. You know, many modern smartphones have surprisingly good built in microphones. And so you can even get that or a compact USB mic that you can plug into and you know, still do slightly better quality than just your cell phone mic. Although again, modern cell phones have really good mics in them. So you can do a decent episode. Now again,

I wouldn't do this for your whole production. I wouldn't continually do this. But if you are going to be doing this for an emergency episode, that will actually get by you can actually use the cell phone and it's not that big of a deal. You can also use things like zoom to like an app like zoom, you can record your audio in it, you can go right into a meeting, you can record your audio to it and have that from from zoom and it gets pretty

decent quality. It's going to do a lot of the background noise removal and you're going to be okay there. So the other thing you can do is also use an app called like ferrite f e r r ite. And that app is something that I'm using on my iPad, I have it on my iPad

and my phone actually. And you can not only record in it, but you can actually produce an episode you can edit your episode right down to it, you can you can export it as an mp3, you can tag it, you can put your cover art on it and everything and then you can actually if depending on how you're doing it, you can actually upload that to your podcast host if you have internet access. So ferrite is a great, great alternative if you can't

get to your normal podcast equipment to do the recording. And then what if you haven't checked it, I did an episode a while back and I'll link to it in the show notes about like doing it on the road doing an episode on the road. And so that that in that case, I was actually I think I called the episode out in the field. And so in that episode, I was actually at the state or the county fair and I was recording an episode and editing

it all on my phone and uploading it and I did that. There are some pitfalls and things to watch out for that. So there are two episodes that I did if you want to go back and check those out. Those will be in the show notes just a swipe or tap away. And you can you can go ahead and test those out. The other thing you can do is using like scheduling

an automation tool. So if you are able to pre schedule, you're able to do that with like emails, you can pre schedule emails and social media posts, they can go live even if you don't have power. And the key to this is again, now you are going to be able to maybe not have a lot of time to do this, you are not going to be able to know that you're going to be without power probably because you don't know when a natural disaster is

going to hit. But let's say you're able to quickly record a few episodes, a few thoughts down you can do that on your cell phone, you can do that on whatever equipment you have. And then let's say you do find a place that does have power, you can go back and schedule all of your emails, your social media posts, you even your your your feed to drop your episode. So you can do things pretty easily like that scheduling ahead of time. So let's

say you get a bunch of them. Maybe you go to town and you upload three or four episodes at once. Because you don't know when you're going to come back online. And then let's say you do come back online, you have three weeks of content, but you come back after two weeks, you can go ahead and and delete those, they don't go out. But if you're not

online, then you can actually have those go out automatically. Now I use for my scheduling of social media posts, I just use business dot facebook.com, which allows me to schedule my Instagram and my Facebook posts. And then twitter.com. If you go to twitter.com, if you're on Twitter, you can schedule the post right there on that. And so you're able to kind of pre do your media stuff and free pre do that. So at least you're still having that

contact with your audience that you're, you can still post to your audience. Now, another thing you can do in an emergency is you can collaborate with other podcasters. So if you're unable to publish an episode, reach out to fellow podcasters who might be willing to share a quick update or even host an episode for you on your on your behalf. So you know, there's definitely you know, at least in most industries, there are other podcasters who

are doing shows similar to yours. I've got other podcasters in my industry with a podcasting industry that that do shows about podcasting, I could reach out to those people, I could ask them if they'd be willing to do an episode for me, or or whatever. So they could record on my behalf. And then again, either send it to me, and I can get that out to one of,

you know, maybe I can get up to the local place that actually still has internet. Or I can go, you know, contact my friend, the one I talked about in the beginning of this episode and say, Hey, here's this file, it's on this drive, will you post this for me because I'm not able to make it to, I'm not able to get out there and post this and you know, the person XYZ podcaster in my industry is did an episode for me, can you post this for

me? So again, it's always helpful to have more than just you know, your podcast production flow. So that way you can actually do this. Also consider, you know, you can you can have, you can have even guest host, maybe where you can appear on other people's podcasts

as an update for your audience. So again, maybe you have several different podcasts in your industry, you know, there's, you know, for this case, there's a, you know, in podcasting, there's pod news, there's podcasting 2.0, there's future of podcasting, there's a bunch of other shows out there that talk about podcasting. And I could reach out to one of them and say, Hey, here's a quick voice memo update, can you update my audience on your feed and say,

I'm around this is what's going on. Like, here's how I'll be back shortly or whatever. So the other thing too, is let's the last thing I would say to one of the last things is, is go ahead and create an emergency plan for the future. So evaluate potential risks to your specific location. Is it hurricanes? Is it earthquakes, etc. You know, I know I live in the Midwest. And tornadoes come quite a bit here, or at least there's the potential.

But depending on the season, and so for me, that means that maybe I need to prepare for when the power might be out because a bad storms coming through. Luckily, we haven't actually had that happen a lot in our area where the power has been out for an extended amount of time. But if it is, what would I do? What would I do for this episode? What would I do for this show? Well, good news for me, my, my work actually has a whole building

generator that runs on natural gas. And so in the event of the actual power just being out, I could still probably produce my episodes there. If I had to take my gear there and do an episode I could. Now maybe the internet might not be there, but I could still produce my episode there if I needed to. Again, it that is if the if the building is still there, but I need to evaluate the potential risks. And again, in my area, storms and power outages

due to tornadoes, maybe or is is a threat. Again, luckily, I haven't had that haven't had to deal with that in a while. But they are a threat. The other thing to do is store backup equipment. So like maybe a handheld recorder or spare batteries specifically for emergency use. So handheld recorders are great. You can get lots of different kinds of handheld recorders. Roland makes a handheld recorder. It's a adderall r2. It's an older device,

but it works well for this. It also, you know, just it has a couple mics on it and it has an SD card that you can just record directly onto it. Your episodes are going to be raw. They're not going to have a whole lot of production content to them. But you can if you store that, put that in a case, keep the batteries separate, never put your batteries together in the devices because they will corrode. But store extra batteries, store extra things

like that that you can have on hand. So that way you can you can things like a handheld recorder again, so that you can create your episode in case you need it. Also, backup your important audio files and project files on a cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox for easy access from any devices. If you have to relocate temporarily, you know, for me, the good thing is, is I bare bones, I have my laptop, which has all my stuff on it that

I can quickly grab and move and take out here with me. I could easily unplug my roadcast or if I needed to and take it with me. I wouldn't have everything like my teleprompter and my monitors in front of me my stream decks, but I could easily take it and relocate if I needed to. But sometimes I might need it's a good thing to have all of those audio files backed up. Now I mentioned that that software called ferrite. That's a great software. And the

cool thing about it is you can actually put all of your audio files in it. So, you know, for instance, I have this as my beginning, you know, kind of music file for this podcast, I can put that in ferrite app. So it's easy for me to drop in. So even if I just record quickly on the iPad, or my phone, I have those, those those media files with me, so that I

can kind of create a polished episode if I need to. Again, it's great. And then that also works well, if you have something like a Google Drive, where you can give access to that for somebody else. So let's say you do make an episode somehow, how are you going to get that to to Johnny over in Texas? Think about those things. Johnny not even not only needs to know how to get into your show and post it, maybe you need to create an account

for him on your media server. But you also have to give him access to your Google Drive, or whatever, so that he has access to those digital assets that he can go ahead and make

the episode for you or post the episode for you. But how are you going to get those files from place to place again, having all that stuff in Google Drive is is handy, because it allows you to then go and actually send those to people and and do what you need to do or have them with you if you need to go to a quickly quickly to a different computer. So also use the expertise as content or the experience, sorry, not the expertise, the

experience as content. Once it's safe and feasible, consider turning your experience into an episode. document how you adapted what you learn how your listeners might prepare sharing real life resilient stories, and and deepen your audience connection. So that's really what I what I took. And actually, that's where I got the idea for this episode from. I mean, luckily, I've never had to do this. I've never had to adapt my podcast, I've never

had to do an emergency service for my podcast. But LC Escobar from the feed did. And she the one thing I appreciated is so again, she used her voice memos app on her phone. She sent that to her co host Rob. He dropped it into the episode. And then the next episode where she was back and everything was okay. She went over it. She said this is what happened.

And for her one of the things that she found to be helpful, or she found out in this case is that when everybody's out of the internet, how do you get that data to and from like, how do you not just like your podcast data, but information on what's going on information on how do you how do you how do you get that information? How do you figure out where you can maybe find the internet? How do you do that? In her case, she found out that the

radio, the FM radio was the local radio station was a huge content for information. Because people were just calling in and saying, Hey, this is the this is the experience that I'm experiencing. This is this is the you know, this is what I need this down here at this corner of this place. I need this I have this if you need it. It was a great exchange for information. But she also said, you know what I'm going to do in in after this, I'm going

to become a ham radio operator. Because in this case, ham radio would have been just as helpful because ham radio would have still worked. So she used her experience as content for the next show that she was on. And you can do that too. So again, to go over and kind of recap what I've been talking about in this episode, because again, natural disasters

happen is, first and foremost, contact your listeners once you're okay. And say, Hey, guys, I'm going to be without power for I don't know how long you may not see an episode from me, but I am okay. That way, when they all of a sudden don't hear from you, if they're used to hearing from you every week or every other week or whatever, they're still able to get that information. They're still doesn't know what's going on. And also pre plan for

emergency episodes have some emergency episodes on hand. Think about your alternative power sources. How are you going to power some equipment? And again, I know probably your first and foremost thought is not going to be podcast equipment, but probably your refrigerator and things like that. But how are you going to be able to get that information out? How are you going to be able to power your cell phone? Because even if you don't have service,

your cell phone is super handy. And you're probably going to find yourself taking notes and recording things because that's where Yeah, you're that's about all you have to do. Have your alternative power sources, whether that be a power bank, a solar charger, a backup generator. And then also, you know, using minimal equipment to get your podcast episodes out. Again, it may just be the notes app on your on your phone to get some information

out to whoever it needs to get out. Maybe you even have something like a Discord server that you can update and things like that. Remember, you use scheduling and automation, have have have all that set up and ready to go if you can batch record your episodes if you're going to be down for a while and then again, create your plan for the future, have it ready to go have some things ready to go in case of emergency. And then also use the

experience as content. That way your listeners, you can let your listeners know on an update, it may not have anything to do again, your your podcast may not have anything to do about podcasting and that but your content, you can still use that content in real life. So guys, what are your thoughts? Have you had to go through a through a natural disaster?

Have you had to go through a natural disaster? Contact me I'd love to hear it. You can go to podcastanswers.com slash contact and leave me a message and and let me know what you've had to do in a natural disaster. What how do you have you got your podcast? Have you used How have you survived this show? And and then also, if you want help starting your podcast, that's a great place or even producing your podcast, I help people produce podcasts,

I can be that trusted friend in the other state. If you want me to produce your podcast for you when you're out, I can be your emergency contact, I can be your emergency emergency person that produces your show for you while you're out. You give me the content again that you can contact me at podcastanswers.com slash contact. I would love to hear that I would love to be that for you. So contact me and we can we can definitely do that. Thanks

again, guys. If you have any questions that you would love covered on this show, again, I'm gonna say it one more time. podcastanswers.com slash contact will get you to that place where you can you can contact me and let me know what you want me to cover on this show, guys until next time, keep podcasting and stay safe. you