What is indiepodfest?

indiepodfest is a new festival celebrating the art and craft of independent podcasting and audio production. It will feature two days of panel discussions and workshops, and an evening of live podcast recordings. The inaugural festival will be held from July 12 to 14, 2019, at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute in Melbourne.

Podcasting has long been an open and democratic medium for all kinds of voices. But now podcasts have exploded in popularity, traditional broadcasters and media outlets are dominating the charts and festival line-ups. indiepodfest seeks to celebrate and elevate the art of indie podcasting, and will focus on local Australian, independent producers both established and emerging.

We'll discuss the joys and obstacles of being indie in the current climate, plus we'll have panels for podcasters and fans alike on diverse topics - everything from oral histories to financial sustainability and whether it's really true that you can make a podcast about anything...

Melbourne is the podcasting capital of Australia, and we're recruiting an amazing line-up of podcast and independent audio hosts and producers. They'll bring our festival to life across ten panels, four workshop sessions and two nights of live recordings for indiepodfest's first year!

But it can't happen without your help. Just like the podcasts to which we want to give voice, we don't (yet) have an external source of funding, so we're crowdfunding the festival by selling our initial offering of tickets, sponsorship packages and other rewards through Pozible.

                                                         Our venue, the Brunswick Mechanics Institute 

Who is indiepodfest for?

We mean indie as in independent, as in indie cinema: podcasts not made by or for a company, broadcaster or major network. If your podcast is a hobby, a passion project, a side-hustle or part of your independent arts practice, then indiepodfest is for you! It’s also for fans of indie podcasts, and for people who want to start their first podcast. And not just podcasts - we want to embrace other kinds of audio production, like audio drama, too. We want indiepodfest to be a place for independent podcast and audio producers, and their fans, to meet, mingle and form a community. And we have programmed this festival from your suggestions. We ran an expression of interest campaign in the month of February and these were the results.

What's happening at indiepodfest?

The full program will be confirmed closer to the date, but we have approached and confirmed guests from top indie podcasts and audio productions. The full detail of our panel subjects, workshops and live nights can be found on our website. So far we've confirmed speakers from Two Words with Taku, The Sweetest Plum, People Movers, Splendid Chaps Productions, Neighbuzz, By Association, Love and Luck, Sisteria and Kentucky Fried Chattin'! We'll profile our confirmed guests, and reveal more of them, in updates and blog posts as the campaign continues. Our confirmed guests can be found on our website - 25 and counting.

Friday evening we have a double-bill live podcast show from some of your favourite (or soon to be favourite) indie podcasters: Sean Whelan's More than a Whelan, and a mash-up of hit film podcasts Hell is for Hyphenates and Club Soderbergh!

Some of the shows with confirmed guests speaking at indiepodfest 2019 (as of May 27th)

Saturday and Sunday daytimes are our main panel and workshop programs, on a range of subjects; the exact panel times and titles are still a bit in flux while we finalise our guest line-up, but the festival venue will open from 10 AM with panels running from 11 AM to 5 PM each day. In addition to the panel program, we'll also have two 90-minute workshops on each day, covering essential areas of podcasting knowledge in more depth with guest experts.

                            Our festival hub is open Friday and Saturday night for podcasters to get a drink and mingle                        

The workshops are:

• Podcasting 101 - everything you need to know to get started with your first podcast!
• How to Build Your Community - how to find, grow and connect with your audience, and turn them into a community. 
• Crowdfundamentals - how to crowdsource funding for your podcast, either through a one-off campaign (like this one!) or a subscription model.
• Technical Audio - more advanced recording, editing and mixing techniques for podcasters looking to up their audio game.

Here's what the weekend program looks like at the moment:

How do the tickets and rewards work?

You can buy a ticket to one or both days of panels, giving you access to all the panels on those days. You can separately book into any of the workshops, and the live podcast shows are also separately ticketed.

In addition, we'll be recording all the panel discussions and they'll be exclusively made available to digital supporters (our $25 pledge level), plus anyone who buys a ticket to a workshop or the panel program. While those panel recordings will only be available to paying supporters of the festival initially, to help fund our first year, we are serious about our commitment to the wider podcasting community. We'll release them publicly within twelve months.

The live podcast recordings will be released for free in our podcast feed, and potentially the feeds of the individual shows involved. Workshops will not be recorded by the festival.

If you're interested in multiple tickets, or tickets to more than one event at the festival, no problem! If you want multiples of the same reward, just choose the appropriate pledge level, then choose your quantity on the next page. If you want more than one reward - a ticket to the Saturday panel program and the Saturday night, say - first choose one of them and confirm your quantity and payment method. Once you're done and you end up back at the campaign page, just click on the next reward you want to add, and go through the same process again for that pledge; Pozible allows you to make as many pledges to a campaign as you like (within the limits we've set). If you want to check that you've made the right pledges, you can do so any time by visited the "My Pledges" page in your Pozible profile, accessed through the main menu button while you're logged in.

If your business is thinking of choosing one of our sponsorship rewards, please get in touch via [email protected] to discuss it with the directors first! Logos will be displayed to the audience at the beginning of each panel; you may also elect to sponsor a workshop. If you have a preference for a specific panel, they'll be allocated based on the order in which pledges were received.

Paying it forward

indiepodfest acknowledges there is a lack of representation by minorities in the indie podcasting space. We strongly feel these are the stories and perspectives our community needs to hear; stories from migrants, LGBTIQA+ people, the disabled, people of colour. In order to encourage more people to begin podcasting we are hosting a "pay it forward" program. indiepodfest is allocating 3 spaces to the 101 Podcasting workshop and you can sponsor someone also. Select a workshop ticket and identify you would like it to be a "pay it forward" reward. indiepodfest will open an application process, once the Pozible is funded, to select the recipients. 

Who's behind indiepodfest?

indiepodfest is co-directed by Melbourne podcasters Carla Donnelly and Ben McKenzie.

Carla Donnelly is an award-winning podcaster, theatre critic and passionate fan. She has three podcasts currently in production – Across the Aisle, Club Soderbergh and re:Discovery. In 2018, Across the Aisle won the Arts and Entertainment category, and in 2019, Club Soderbergh and Across the Aisle are finalists for three awards between them in the Australian Podcast Awards. As an independent writer and producer, Carla has spoken at the Emerging Writers Festival, and produced and directed events for the Melbourne Queer Film Festival (in conjunction with the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives).

Ben McKenzie is a comedian, writer and game designer. Ben co-hosted the Doctor Who celebration podcast Splendid Chaps and was a writer, producer and star of time travel audio comedy Night Terrace, currently being broadcast on BBC radio. An expert crowdfunder, Ben has run or consulted on campaigns raising more than $150,000. He was Production Manager for the Freeplay Independent Games Festival for five years. He currently hosts monthly Terry Pratchett book club podcast Pratchat with Elizabeth Flux (shortlisted for a 2019 Ditmar Award) and re:Discovery with Carla.

Carla's experience and expertise as a program manager in the IT sector, and Ben's experience working as a production manager on festivals and live performance events, gives us confidence that we can create and run a great festival. We've been working on it for months; we've confirmed a venue, we have most of the program in place, and we've got a bunch of great panellists keen to discuss the future of independent audio production in Australia. All we need is you! Buy a ticket, a digital membership or even a sticker and help make this festival real.

The full basic budget for the festival - including paying staff and speakers, hiring the venue, and the other costs noted in the graph below - is around $24,000. However, we have put together a slimmer, barebones version and know that we can make this festival work on the goal of this Pozible campaign - $19,500. We've also reserved tickets for sale after the Pozible campaign, and to make sure the rewards work without going over our capacity.

indiepodfest has been formed as a partnership between the Co-Directors. While it doesn't have not-for-profit status - something we'd look to grow into in future years - we are committed to being transparent in our finances and in paying panellists, workshop facilitators, performers and staff, and keeping our reliance on volunteers low.