Evaluating your podcast initiative is beneficial for several reasons. It can provide yourself and others with the opportunity to learn from your effort, support the (further) development of your podcast and/or help demonstrate its impact. Evaluation can also be necessary for reasons of accountability. For instance, when your podcast is developed with external funding.
Often times, evaluation only gets attention when an initiative is (almost) finished. That’s unfortunate, as it limits the possibilities to conduct a thorough evaluation. Ideally, you already plan your evaluation during the early planning stage of your podcast. This allows you to collect all the relevant data to develop a thorough podcast plan, gain insight in the effects of your podcast, and improve upon your effort.
In this section we will provide some tips for developing an evaluation plan for your podcast. We will also describe some relevant evaluation methods. Before we do so, we will briefly discuss three types of evaluation that can benefit your podcasting initiative.