The idea for developing podcasts arose from a discussion during a community advisory board meeting about the need to transfer the content of a Science Café to the Web-based realm. Science Cafés are in-person, casual events that encourage two-way conversations about health- or science-related topics between scientists, health practitioners, and the lay public to enhance health literacy, trust, and colearning. A series of these events had been recently conducted in the community, and they were termed as “garden cafés,” as many had taken place in community gardens. While successful in stimulating conversation and idea exchange, the reach of these cafés was limited due to the barriers of geography, weather, and time. Therefore, the decision was made to create a series of health-related podcasts based upon a recent community health needs assessment that would provide an extensive library of topics to share via social media. Therefore, our team decided to incorporate another social media platform to disseminate community health and medical research information. The Mayo Clinic Center for Clinical and Translational Science’s Community Engagement Program (CEP) had a strong social media presence. The program had a WordPress blog, Twitter page, and Facebook page [8]. One area that we decided to explore was the creation of a community-academic podcast. Like the cafés, we planned to use a similar process to determine topics and considered this part of what we called our Social Media Community Garden Café approach.

The development of meaningful podcast content was supported by CEP and Smartride Network. Our partner, Smartride Network, is a collaborative, community-based organization that hosts a variety of cultural, art, health, and biomedical research programs. To select topics for podcasts, we referred the Olmsted County Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) [20]. The CHNA not only recommended health topics, but also stated that new social media approaches should be developed for disseminating information within the growing Olmsted County community. This article reports the process that stakeholders used to develop podcast topics and promote the podcasts themselves on social media, as well as the basic analytics of audience reach, impressions, and engagement as reported through the number of downloads, shares, and reactions posted on SoundCloud, Twitter, and Facebook.

The podcast team decided to focus the first few episodes on community-identified health and wellness needs. The systematic community-engaged approach involved Olmsted County Public Health Services, Olmsted Medical Center, Mayo Clinic, and several community service organizations jointly collecting data from residents on their health needs [20]. The organizers of the CHNA held a number of community events as well as other activities with local community members and community organizations to prioritize the most pressing health topics locally. The top 5 topics included: injury prevention, immunizations, overweight or obesity, mental health, and financial stress. After the initial episodes, the podcast team expanded the content list to topics related to cultural events, health and wellness, and international health. The change in content selection also expanded the pool of guest speakers for the podcast. Local media and internal communications for events like academic seminars provided other sources of inspiration for the podcast.

Guests were invited in-person by the host or other team members to share their stories. We determined the credibility of guest speakers by exploring local content expertise. For national and international speakers, we connected with the organizers of a number of speaker series at our academic medical center (eg, Grand Rounds and other medical seminars) to ask visiting faculty to create a podcast during their visit. Guests shared their stories related to community priorities and biomedical research.

The episode format consisted of the following:

We used a CPER research approach to determine sponsorship for podcast recording equipment and to prioritize episode creation. This approach involved working directly with the CEP, local community partners, and health care providers. The podcast design process focused on audience and delivery. We recognized that the podcast alone does not foster communication and information dissemination like other forms of social media. Therefore, it was linked to other interactive social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, where listeners could comment and post reactions.

Our primary target audience for the podcasts was residents of Olmsted County, MN, with an interest in learning about (1) health and wellness; (2) community events; (3) opportunities for civic engagement; and (4) biomedical research. The podcast featured guests from local agencies, nonprofits, the health department, community members, and academic researchers (local, national, and international) [9].

SoundCloud was selected as the main hosting platform for the podcast [21]). This platform allows members to share digital audio content in the form of a podcast. It also allows broadcasters to create albums and playlists for their recorded and posted content. Our podcast was shared on iTunes through a plug-in of the Rich Site Summary feed. Podcast episodes are sharable over other forms of social media.

The Community Board Podcast produced 45 episodes with most featuring local speakers. Most of the listeners for the podcast were from the United States, with a small portion from other countries. We used existing social media platforms to promote the podcasts and asked community stakeholders to promote the episodes to their stakeholders. The episodes that garnered the greatest number of listeners were those related to biomedical research topics, with women’s health having the most total plays.

Podcasts are an emerging strategy for dissemination of pertinent issues in the community with the potential to raise awareness and increase knowledge of health and wellness as well as biomedical research. We purposefully selected podcasts as a social media platform because they allowed us to create quality content that was sharable within the community without limitations of time, audience reach, geography, or weather with our stakeholders. This platform has proven to be effective with diverse communities. Olmsted County, MN, is the 8^thlargest county in the state, with Hennepin County being the largest with continued growth in the community due to a new public-private economic initiative called Destination Medical Center [24,25]. The growing changes in our community have influenced the need to identify the most effective methods to share information related to health and wellness with community stakeholders. The increased use of mobile devices by patients, patient advocates, and community members allows new ways for academic medical centers to connect with stakeholders and increase knowledge about wellness and biomedical research. This use of a podcast in our local community facilitated a new approach for promoting communication and awareness of biomedical research and cultural events and information about local community resources (14). Additionally, the Community Board Podcast’s reach extended beyond the local community, with downloads recorded throughout the United States and beyond. This unexpected reach in a global community is notable because the topics reflected not only the interests of the local community but also the interests of a larger global audience.

Using health priorities identified by community members through the CHNA as the basis for the initial podcasts proved to be a strength. These topics led to more direct conversations with stakeholders (ie, community members, patients, service providers, and biomedical researchers) on potential topics of interest. Another strength was the ease in linking podcasts to other social media platforms, which allowed a larger audience to experience, interact with, and discuss the podcasts in their own social networks. Unfortunately, we were unable to fully track the depth of reach of our podcasts with the available analytics or to capture an increase in knowledge since we did not include an evaluation measure for knowledge gain. Future studies should use more in-depth analytic programs for tracking audience reach and interaction. Future studies could employ experimental designs to assess knowledge gain, audience reach, and longer-term consequences on health and wellness, clinical practice, and biomedical research.

One significant strength and key feature of the podcast is that it relates directly to recommendations from Dr Christopher Austin, Director of National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who advised us in an interview that researchers, “must talk in language the public can understand” [26]. Podcasts are an emerging platform that biomedical research programs can use to directly connect with the community in places where they will hear it and in language they will understand. Moreover, actively engaging community members and researchers in continued bidirectional dialogues helps reduce the time needed to raise the general population’s awareness and understanding of research findings and how they address community-related needs [27].

While our results show that developing and promoting health- and research-related podcasts is feasible, more research is needed to determine the best ways to develop and promote these educational sessions to maximize audience reach (ie, number of downloads, shares, reactions, and reposts). An understanding of audience reach will stimulate colearning, thus increasing the knowledge of both community members and health care practitioners or researchers. For instance, podcasts are a platform often used in Free Open Access Medical education (FOAM). The FOAM movement has altered the way health care practitioners interact with each other and serves as a supplement to traditional pedagogical methods to increase the knowledge of medical learners [28,29]. Moreover, the use of social media platforms like podcasts promotes the translation of evidence-based medicine to the medical community to increase knowledge [30]. Lessons learned from the use of podcasts in the FOAM movement are translational to increase research literacy and overall knowledge of health in the community.

Future directions for the podcast include developing and evaluating novel ways to better track active engagement and knowledge increase of listeners. The evaluation process should include the application of Kirkpatrick’s model level 1 and 2 to determine listeners’ reactions and knowledge gain from listening to the podcast [31]. We may also consider including moderated postings to our existing social media pages that will encourage direct communication about health topics and health research to aid in the evaluation process. This process may also include the use of Facebook Live or other video blogging tools to facilitate real-time communication with listeners. This process could increase bidirectional communication, engagement, and knowledge with health care experts and the community. Moreover, the addition of another theoretical framework, such as Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance, may provide more consistency and foster a process to determine individual and institutional impact [32,33]. Finally, we found that episodes that focused on community-identified topics and promoted by stakeholders were the most popular. Therefore, more effort is needed to devise a standardized community promotion plan to further extend our audience reach to address other health and health research topics. For example, for future work, we plan to develop a toolkit to guide community organizations on the best methods and ways to promote podcasts developed in partnership.

In conclusion, our study suggests that podcasts linked with other social media platforms are a feasible strategy for sharing and stimulating communication about health and biomedical information to a wide audience without barriers of time, geography, and weather. These preliminary results will inform the development of a large-scale trial of Social Media Garden Cafés (podcasts linked with social media) to educate and empower communities, health providers, and biomedical researchers for improving health care research and delivery.