How Invisible Hand Used Podcasts to Create a Platform for Authentic Voices

How can people-driven podcasts harness the power of storytelling to propel the world forward?

Pod People worked with Invisible Hand across multiple projects to include talent with key subject matter expertise and lived experience to tell stories about the trans journey, climate change, and the LGBTQ+ community.?

“We always want to center the voices of the people?within a community that we are celebrating,” said Genevieve Roth , Founder & CEO of Invisible Hand. “We really think about passing the mic and giving authorship to the people whose stories need to be centered, and work to find the most authentic way to do that. So in this case, that meant we literally passed on the microphone to let these individuals share their own stories and have authorship.”

Invisible Hand brought on Pod People for production on several high-profile projects for Spotify, including Raise Your Voice (a Pride feature) With Love (an International Women's Day feature) and Youth Dispatches: Our Earth (an Earth Day feature).

To accomplish this, Pod People’s in-house talent team leveraged its extensive global community to staff eight bilingual project roles across four different languages in under four days. They even sourced voice talent fluent in West Greenlandic (a language spoken by less than fifty thousand people) to bring authenticity to an episode of Youth Dispatches: Our Earth.

The speed and scale of these projects was only possible because of Pod People’s carefully curated community of specialized audio pros coupled with a quality-at-scale production team.

“Pod People had a ‘yes and’ culture, focused on how to make this happen,” said Roth.

Pod People also thoughtfully selected the right production talent with subject matter expertise and lived experience to tell stories from the LGBTQ+ community. “From the person who designed the cover art, to the production manager, to the audio engineer, the community was centered at every step of the way,” added Roth. “And that was another reason why Pod People was such an obvious choice to us – their commitment to that kind of representation.”

The result of this partnership was an ultra-quick turnaround in production and staffing for huge-lift podcasts built around niche talent in multiple languages.?

“One of the things I loved about Raise Your Voice in particular was that it was decidedly celebratory. We weren't going to gloss over the issues a community faces, of course, but this podcast was about joy and people celebrating their whole selves, which I think is important for Pride to do,” said Roth.

“Pride is not just a moment to understand the issues. You want to be working on those issues of the community 365 days a year,” added Roth.

Invisible Hand has also grown its own network as a result of these projects.? “As result of these projects we’ve expanded our network. In fact, we continue to work with a number of these podcasters? to this day. That's something I'm really proud of,” concluded Roth.

For a podcast playlist that lifts up the voices of global activists in the LGBTQIA+ community, find Raise Your Voice on Spotify.?

And if you are looking to develop a podcast as a vehicle to platform authentic voices, we’d love to help. Pod People sources talent and produces chart-topping podcasts for the world’s biggest brands and many non-profits, with over 50M listens and hundreds of award nominations.