How to Track a Liar with Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story Showrunner Karen Given

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

If you’ve ever worked on a serialized narrative podcast, at some point—it could be episode 2, or  episode 5, or episode 8—you may have gotten all tangled up. Wait! I think I used the scene where Miss Plum finds the gun in the library in episode 1, but here it is again…or did I use it already? I don’t know!

It’s hard enough when you’re sure of all of the facts. But what about when you’re tracking a scammer? Someone who lies without compunction? But someone who doesn’t ALWAYS lie? Then, you might throw your hands up and say—sorry. This is impossible. That’s the situation my guest, showrunner Karen Given, walked into when Dear Media hired her and reporter Sara Ganim to investigate serial scammer Coco Berthmann for the series Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story. 

Coco was a young woman who gained fame and followers by weaving tall tale after tall tale. She claimed to have been sex trafficked for years, after which she gained acclaim as an advocate for trafficking victims. She also claimed that her therapist locked her in a basement, that her mother killed her sister, and that she was dying of cancer. 

 
After a while, it seemed quite reasonable to assume that Coco lied about everything.

But what if parts of her outlandish story…were actually true? Today on Sound Judgment, how to solve the puzzle of a serialized narrative podcast — when you can’t be certain of anything. This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved audio storyteller by pulling apart one episode at a time, together. I’m Elaine Appleton Grant.

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Elaine Appleton Grant

Karen Given, it is just the coolest thing that you're here. Thank you for being with us. 

Karen Given

It is so fun. I’m glad we’re able to do this.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So Karen, you are the showrunner of Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story, which is reported and hosted by your colleague Sara Ganim. For new listeners, who is Coco Berthmann and why did her story interest Dear Media, the production company that released it?

Karen Given

Yeah, so Coco Berthmann is a woman who grew up in Germany, moved to Utah, joined the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and started telling the world that a whole list of really, really terrible things had happened to her in her childhood. And it turns out that most of what she said was not true. And the reason why Dear Media brought Sara and I on to do this project is because Coco had appeared on their flagship podcast as a guest—as someone that they promoted and said, look at the great work that this woman has done. And then Coco got arrested for faking a cancer diagnosis. And Dear Media was like, Oh, my goodness, we really need to figure out what of this story was true? What of the story wasn't true? We need to set the record straight.

Elaine Appleton Grant

That is amazing, actually. And it's every journalist’s worst nightmare, too.

Karen Given

Right! Right. So my big plan for Episode 1 was to interview everyone who had ever interviewed her. And most people who interviewed her were like, no. No, it was—it's too traumatizing. I can't talk about that. Or no—I mean, why would I want that kind of publicity? So it ended up being the two hosts from the Skinny Confidential, who are the people who brought us on to do this project, and Chris Hanson, who many people remember from To Catch A Predator—who now has a YouTube show. And he had Coco on his YouTube show, and he was in talks with her to do something far bigger with her when he discovered that her story wasn't true.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, my goodness. Every now and then, you and Sara reflect on—well, journalists do this, good journalists do that. And I'm starting to see this really is an intentional sub-theme throughout the series.

Karen Given

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we didn't want to do a series that was just all about this person and her being bad, right? Like, I feel like there are so many scammer stories out there that just place all the blame on the scammer.  Not that she doesn't deserve a whole bunch of the blame. But there are a lot of societal safety nets that we wanted to look at. So we look at journalism, we look at other advocacy groups who were in a position to see that she was lying—that she was doing harm to the industry—but that were kind of riding her coattails. And so they just kind of went with it. So we want to look at all the different ways that there were failures to allow this to happen.

Elaine Appleton Grant

When we invite a guest on to Sound Judgment, we ask them to share an episode of their podcast that they either loved or found very challenging to make. Sometimes those are one and the same. Karen shared the third episode of this series. It’s called Unforced Errors. There’s a link to it in our show notes.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Let's take a listen to this clip from the trailer. 

Clip from Believable

Sara Ganim: But something unexpected happened when we started investigating Coco. Sure, we were definitely able to prove that a lot of the things that Coco says are lies. We kinda knew that we were gonna find that. But the thing about Coco’s story that surprised us? We found there are parts that might actually be true.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What was your first step in investigating this story?

Karen Given

We had a good head start, because there is an investigative journalist in Utah named Lynn Packer. He's like 70 years old. He's kind of mostly retired, but still does these YouTube investigations. And he had investigated Coco, and he was just perfectly placed to do it because he's in Utah, where she is. He grew up Mormon, so he had lots of connections in the church. He actually did his missionary work in Germany. So he spoke German, and he works with radio stations and news organizations in Germany. So he had a sense of—there are very complicated ways that you have to report in Germany because the privacy laws are so strict.

So he had the lay of the land in all of these sort of complicated worlds that CoCo was working in and coming from. He had done an exposé on her, that kind of got us the broad strokes of her story—the big, big, broad strokes. But it was unlike anything I had worked on, because first of all, not very many people have seen Lynn's YouTube exposé—so people haven't written on it and expanded on it. There was the work he had done. And then pretty much everything else is new reporting. Fact checking this thing is a nightmare, because none of this has ever been written about anywhere. But yeah, our first step was to talk to Lin. Absolutely, our first step is to go to someone who has already started the work for us. And we interviewed him and he's a character in this story, too. And then he started to make a few introductions. So he introduced us to Coco's mother, which was super important because Coco says her mother was her main abuser, right? But he also introduced us to many of the church members who Coco had lived with during her time in Utah.

Elaine Appleton Grant

And so did you keep a huge spreadsheet? 

Karen Given

Yeah. And it's really just like, going through and finding any connection of someone who you think you might—who might have known her, and calling them up. And it was very difficult because…I think when we started this, we saw it as a scam that had certainly injured some people financially. But hey, people get scammed all the time. And they talk about it. We didn't realize the sort of emotional scam that she was putting people through and how difficult it was gonna be for people to talk about this.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I think a lot of people embarking on investigative stories—this is a fear, like, how do I actually talk to someone? How do I persuade them to talk to me? And how do I do it in a way that doesn't create a power imbalance, doesn't feel exploitative… Tell me the story of how you worked with someone who was initially reluctant to speak with you.

Karen Given

Hmm, gosh, there were so many. Hey, look, some people said they didn't want to talk and that was it. We're like, okay, fine, great, right? But then there was this whole category of people who would say, I don't want to talk, I just don't want to talk. But can we get on the phone? Or can we get on Zoom and talk off the record? And so we'd get on these calls. And it was clear that they just wanted to unburden, that they just wanted to get it off their chest, but that they weren't sure about using their name or using their voice or using whatever. And I think more than any other projects that I've personally worked on, there are people who we don't say their last name because they asked us not to. There are people who we don't even say their first name; we gave them a different first name. There's going to be one person later in the season who we are gonna alter her voice because she didn't want her voice to be heard. She didn't want that notoriety. And there's one person who said, hey, look, we need to limit the scope of this interview. She was just too hurt still by everything that had happened to talk about everything that happened to her. And so she wanted to know ahead of time what we were going to talk about. And she wanted to say, okay, yeah, that's okay for me to talk about, or no, I just can't talk about that. That's too painful, or that's too personal. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

In my era of public radio, which ended in 2015, it was exceedingly rare to ever use an anonymous source. Or even do first names or something. Just exceedingly rare. And I think the podcast world is different. Now, I don't know whether public radio is loosening up their standards around anonymity or not. What's your sense of this?

Karen Given

I think one of the reasons why it's exceedingly rare in public radio is because there's this idea of how can you as the reporter be sure that this person is who they say they are—that their experience is what they say it is, right? Like, how can you trust them if you're not allowed to use their name? How can you fact check them if you're not allowed to—all of these things, right? Because CoCo was so prolific in her communications, like texts, and emails and Facebook messages. And so these people have all provided us with gobs and gobs of proof of what they're saying. So their truthfulness is not in doubt, because we have all of this stuff to back it up. So I think even in public radio, there are mechanisms by which people can be not identified. And that is one of them. That they have to be able to back up their story with other stuff. With other people who corroborate it, with documents, with some sort of proof that they are who they say they are, and that their story is true.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Going back to the trailer for a minute, you're expecting all lies. But now maybe there's some truth. And how do you respond when what you expected to find in an investigation is turned on its head by the actual reporting—which of course is far more common than people think it is. 

Karen Given

Well, I mean, so that's actually why I picked Episode Three for us to pick apart, right? Because that's exactly what happened when we were making Episode Three.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, tell me the story.

Karen Given

So we had finished Episode Two. It was written, fact-checked, legal review, edited. And I sat down to write Episode Three. I wrote a whole draft of Episode Three. Sara read it, and she said, No. This isn't what we should be saying at this time. It's too soon for all these characters. The story isn't there yet. We gotta just throw it away. And I was like—I just saw your face. It was horrified, right?

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Not what you want to happen ever, but it does happen often.

Karen Given

But, yeah, I am a huge fan of planning. A series like this—I've got it planned out before I do my first interview. I've done so much research, and I figured out the story, and I know who my characters are. I know what's going to be Episode One, Episode Two, Episode Three, Episode Four. I've got them all figured out. And in this case, because it's an investigation, and because the investigation had so many late changes—like, we were under deadline, and getting these massive interviews that changed everything—all my planning kept going out the window. Like, nope. So fun that you planned that. Not gonna happen!

Elaine Appleton Grant

So now, with the draft of Episode 3 in the trash, and new information coming in from all sides, Karen and Sara are in a pickle. Not only does the new information make early information suspect—now they’re pretty confused. Because, remember, this is a scam story. The main character, Coco, lies all the time, to many different people. And if Karen and Sara are confused, they know listeners will be as well. And they can’t let that happen, because think about it—when a story confuses you, do you stick around? No way. So, to try to figure out the real timeline, they hop on a call together and retrace Coco’s steps and interactions. As they do that, they realize they need to become part of the story. 

Karen Given

We realized that you, the listener, needed us to sort of…suss it out with you. To sort of go along on the journey with you. So from that point, we just—every time Sara and I would get into these conversations about what should we do next, we would record them and use them as part of the podcast.

Elaine Appleton Grant

So let's listen. This is from about seven minutes or so into Episode Three: Unforced Errors.  

Clip from Believable

Sarah Ganim (narration): I’m gonna be frank. Things like this really get Karen and I worked up because we're trying to answer a very important question: Was Coco Berthman actually trafficked by her mother? It's a question that a lot of people have just stopped bothering to ask. Karen and I talk about this a lot. 

Sarah Ganim: Videos of her singing Celine Dion songs, like who cares? Here we are, the last two people who are trying to figure out if there's any truth in her story when everyone else just wants to believe that everything is made up. It's just, it's so frustrating. There's no reason to lie about that stuff. And every time she does, it makes it more difficult for us to believe the important things. If she had just been more honest and truthful about herself, she'd probably still be an advocate. You know, and instead, like, she brought herself down with these unforced errors.

Elaine Appleton Grant

What's interesting about this particular passage is not simply that you included yourselves as guides—this happened, then that happened, we're going to take you along for the journey and make sure you don't get lost—but that you're including how you feel about the subject. Not traditional journalism at all, right? And you're angry at her. 

Karen Given

Yeah. Yeah.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Why? Why include—this had to have been a conversation about: do we include that or not? 

Karen Given

I believe we should believe survivors, right? I believe that we shouldn't just question people who say that these terrible things have happened to them. So I felt like it was really important, on the one hand, to take each one of her accusations seriously. But then we also knew that we had to acknowledge what we were feeling and what we think the listener was feeling, which is anger, that someone would lie about these things. Like, if she's lying about Celine Dion, why wouldn't she be lying about being sex trafficked as a child? Right? I think that's a logical way for people to feel. And so I think we needed to acknowledge our frustration with her to sort of acknowledge that the listener is going to be feeling that frustration, too. And like, this woman just lied; why should I pay attention to anything she says? And the reason why is that she's talking about some very important topics. And she's talking about things that really do happen to real people. Not the Celine Dion stuff. But the rest of the stuff really does happen to people. And that we need to take those sorts of accusations seriously. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And that makes a lot of sense, because you're walking a very fine line with a story where someone is lying about being a victim of something as horrific as sex trafficking. And in fact, she's accusing her mother of being the primary person who did it.

Karen Given

And by Episode Three, we haven't revealed whether or not there is any truth to that story. Like, there are things that we think might have actually happened to her. It's needing to acknowledge that this person is lying about a lot of things, but there's still a need to go through and look at them one by one.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I think you also do something that is very valuable, which is that when you're doing any kind of major story about sensitive topics, big issues that happen to a lot of people, processes that have gone wrong—you have to understand what the regular, typical process is, right? So you found someone in Episode Three who explains how real sex-trafficking survivors often tell their stories in ways that sounded very much like the way CoCo was telling her story.

Clip from Believable

Sara Ganim (narration): It’s extremely rare for someone to lie about this kind of thing.

Val Richey: So, I have worked on hundreds and hundreds of sexual assault and commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking cases. And I have almost never, ever come across somebody who made it up.

Sara Ganim (narration): That’s Valiant Richey.

Sara Ganim: That’s a great name. I love it. 

Val Richey: Thank you. You can also call me Val. It’s—most people call me Val.

Sara Ganim (narration): Val worked for the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. And when we spoke to him, it was his job to help the OSCE’s 57 member nations do a better job of combating trafficking. Val knows about Coco’s story because Coco actually spoke at one of his conferences. She was invited because her story has a lot of believability. Like the idea that she was trafficked by her own mother.

Val Richey: We see a lot of familial trafficking, both in the United States and in Europe. I mean, everywhere. 

Karen Given

They might get some things wrong. The story might change over time as they become more comfortable sharing certain things. There might be things that they hold back, and then they reveal and it looks like they've lied, but really, they were just trying to protect themselves. 

So I mentioned that there was a veteran Utah journalist who had done a lot of reporting on Coco. But when he released his YouTube exposé, there were survivors who felt that it wasn't very trauma-informed, because he was finding holes in her story and saying, look, see, that's why the whole thing is a hoax. And they were saying, wait, if anyone looked too closely at my story, they'd find holes, too. That doesn't mean I'm lying. So—the episode that actually got nixed was all about that. It was all about survivor stories and how Coco was moving through this world. The problem with the episode was that Coco was doing really terrible things to actual survivors, when she was putting herself out there as an advocate. And so it was too early to tell the listeners about all those terrible things. But the reason why I had put that in this spot is because I was very aware of the fact that there were a lot of survivors who didn't want us to tell this story, because they were afraid that Coco's story would make people question their stories. And so we really wanted to take the time and say—just because Coco is lying doesn't mean that that survivor you met at some event last week is lying.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Exactly. And it really struck me that he says, almost no one lies if they have been sex trafficking. Their stories are almost always true. And I think that that was such an important thing to put in there. Because otherwise—I mean, think of the years and decades and decades and decades of women who would go on trial, saying, I've been raped—and their lives were torn apart. That must have been extremely, extremely tricky to deal with. 

Karen Given

Yeah, I think the entire thing is extremely tricky to deal with in that sense. On the one hand, the stories that she was telling can be…

Elaine
They're sensational.

Karen Given
Right, yeah, that's exactly the right word. They're sensational. But we had to be very aware that the things that Coco said happened to her have happened to people. They just might not have happened to Coco. And so we had to be very careful about the way that we're telling those stories. And some of the stories that she told people, we just decided not to use in the podcast because of that reason. Because they just crossed the line from being like—we need to tell this story for people to understand what Coco was doing out there in the world, versus, are we just telling the story just because it feels like an episode of Law and Order SVU?

Elaine Appleton Grant

Part of what the Coco Berthmann story is about is the question of why we believe what we believe—and how culture influences why some groups are more trusting than others, sometimes to a fault. In this case, Coco had inserted herself into the Mormon community in Salt Lake City—the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. And various church members took her in when she said she had no place to stay. One was a woman named Becky, who didn’t just take Coco in; she mothered her for quite some time. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I'm gonna play a clip and what's happened is that things have gone pretty far south.

Clip from Believable

Sara Ganim: Becky and her husband decide it is time to ask Coco to move out. They pick a day when Scott will be home, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. 

Becky: But it was the Monday before Thanksgiving and my husband was away. She came in and asked if she could talk to me. I had started to set up my Christmas tree. So I came into the room to talk to Coco and she said, well, I told my therapist that I can feel that there's kind of a wall that's forming between us. And I'm thinking, yes, because I've learned to set healthy boundaries. She said I had told him that I was feeling that it was time that I needed to move out. I said, we’re feeling the same thing. And I said, I’ve unraveled some lies. And she immediately, like, what lies?

Elaine Appleton Grant

This is such an evocative scene, in large part because of the Christmas tree. Tell me about the decision around the Christmas tree.

Karen Given

That's hilarious. I love that you've captured that because one of our readers, she was like, I don't think you need the Christmas tree. I think you should get rid of the Christmas tree. And I was like, oh, no. No, no. The Christmas tree is staying. The Christmas tree is not going anywhere. I appreciate your point of view. I know that you've been hired to do this, to tell us your thoughts. But the Christmas tree has to stay. I'd love to say that I was brilliant in asking Becky about the Christmas tree, but she's a really good storyteller, and she knows the details that are really going to make a story. And so that was just part of how she told the story to us. And I did think it was very evocative. Like, she's putting up her Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving, right? It tells you so much about Becky, and that moment. And for me, what a relief it must have been to be like, oh, she's not going to be here at Christmas.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right, and simply to be able to picture—you know, what I picture is a very comfortable living room, maybe an older home, maybe they've lived there for 30 years. There might be one of those Santa’s elf things that you move around—Elf on a Shelf—on the shelf already. I've just made up this entire set because of that one line. But you didn't ask her that? 

Karen Given

We didn't. But those are the kinds of details I sometimes do ask for. Because I find those little touchstone moments to be so helpful in sort of bringing you into the story and making it an evocative moment. She just happened to give us that part of the story. She actually is a very, very detailed storyteller. So, we probably did five hours’ worth of interviews with Becky. She's a storyteller’s dream. But yeah, you end up making a lot, a lot of decisions about what stays in and what goes out.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Which brings us to the very big topic of storyboarding. 

First of all, let's set out the fact that when you set out to do a serialized narrative series, you're taking on so much. A single narrative episode is complicated. When you have a serialized narrative tale, you have to advance the story between each episode to the next to make sure that people come along for the ride, so that it's logical. And you have to keep track of the details that you have already introduced. So by the time you get to four, five, six, eight episodes, there's like—oh, wait a minute, did we already put the Christmas tree in Episode Two? Let me go back and check. You know, there's that internal consistency. It is complicated. 

So now add to the fact that Becky is one of a million characters, you've got five hours of tape just from her. A lot of people at that point would be like, oh, my God, what did I get myself into? I want to cry. I want to run away. Did you get to that point, ever?

Karen Given

I feel like I'm still in that point, sometimes. So I am a huge fan of planning ahead, storyboarding, all that kind of thing. This is what we think is going to go here, what we think—and it was constantly, constantly changing. I was using Trello to storyboard this project. And I would go back into Trello, and move things around and adjust it. And at one point, this was only supposed to be a six-episode series. And then I was like, I think it's eight. And then I went, No, it's 10. And then—Coco didn't make it easy. Because normally, you would be able to tell a story sort of from beginning to end. But Coco would—every few months, her relationship with whoever she was focusing on would blow up, and then she'd move on to someone else. And she'd start the story all over again.  

You cannot tell this story in order. We're using a lot of chronology—storytelling is based on chronology—but you can't start at the beginning and end at the end because it keeps changing. It's too complicated, right? Like people aren't going to remember why that moment’s important if you tell it in chronological order.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Which is part of the trouble with dealing with any kind of scammer, or con man or criminal, because…lies aren't chronological, right? Lies shift and change. So if you know you're going into a story where there is a liar, you know you're going to have to deal with this complication.

You plan the storyboard in Trello which is, you know, project management software like Asana. You can do board views where they're little blocks, right? And I know, Karen, from knowing you, that you love Post-its, right?
 

Karen Given

I love Post-it Notes.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Give me the 30-second version of how you use Post-it Notes to storyboard an episode.

Karen Given

Yeah, and—so I'm using Trello exactly the same way. The only difference is that it's electronic, and I don't have to move things around on my wall. 

But what I would do to storyboard an episode is I would take one color of Post-its for each voice. For each character in the story, right? So each character gets their own color. And I put plot points on them. Story beats. It's not exactly the soundbite that I'm gonna use. It's the concept. So, “Becky and the Christmas tree” might be something that I write on a Post-it Note with Becky, in Becky's color. And then I throw them up on a wall and start moving them around. Because I really feel like figuring out the order of an episode is figuring out a puzzle. And you just gotta figure out where you need to begin, where you need to move to—and you've got to be nimble. And I find the physicality of moving things around gets me out of worrying about how I'm gonna write that transition, or how am I going to deal with this piece of tape that the audio is not so great, right? You can get really bogged down in all those little details, but those details you can figure out later. First, you have to figure out how you're going to tell the story. And so throwing it up on a wall and moving things around really—pulls in a different part of my brain. It's like the puzzle part of my brain. And that's how I figure out how to tell a story.

Elaine Appleton Grant

That's brilliant. I think you just probably helped 3M. They should create a package of Karen Given Storyboarding Post-its. We should get in touch with them and tell them to do that. 

Karen Given

I should. I really should. Because the amount of Post-its I go through in my life is insane.

So in Trello, I do the same thing. They are cards in Trello. And I color-code them by character. And then I can move them around. What I generally do is I put everything in strict chronological order. And then that gives me a starting point from where I can decide what I'm going to move around, what I'm going to tell out of order, what I'm going to foreshadow, or whatever. And so if you're doing it on a wall, you find yourself like—okay, now I have to move 20 Post-its so that I can put that one at the top. Using something like Trello, you can just move it and everything else moves down.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Let me go to just a couple of lightning round questions. The first is, how has working on this series changed you in a way that you did not expect?

Karen Given

I think it has made me much more nimble. I am a person who wants to plan everything, figure it all out ahead of time. Just not possible here. So it has made me stretch those nimbleness skills.

Elaine Appleton Grant

The second question is, who would your dream guest be for Sound Judgment?

Karen Given

Okay, so my favorite storyteller is Jonathan Goldstein. Heavyweight. I mean, the way he builds his stories, and they unfold…I always laugh, and I usually cry at least once. And I am not an easy cry. But it's always that sort of good, beautiful cry. It's not the sad, ugly cry. It's like, “oh, the beauty of humanity” cry. Every time.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I’m gonna have to play this clip for him—I don't even know him—to say, you have to come on my show. That was beautiful.

Elaine Appleton Grant

At the end of every episode, I give you just a few of the takeaways I learned from my guest. Here are today’s. For more, visit our blog. The link’s in our show notes. 

1. Karen and Sara set out to tell Coco Berthmann’s story as more than a basic scammer story. They wanted to investigate the social safety nets that allowed Coco’s deception to happen in the first place. It’s the concept of preventable harm: What makes for a much richer, more noteworthy and useful investigation is whether, in fact, the harm could have been prevented, by whom, and why it wasn’t. Especially with true crime, there’s a temptation to tell only a good yarn—the sensational story about the scammer. But those stories are one-dimensional. They feel like cotton candy: they might taste good at the time, but later you might wonder why you bothered.
   
   
2. Avoid creating unintended consequences. One of the most important and interesting lessons from Believable comes from the tricky line Karen and Sara walked. They needed to investigate the validity of Coco’s stories without casting doubt on the stories of every sex trafficking victim, which could have done significant harm. One way they did this— that I would certainly steal this if I were you—was to establish early on what is generally known about a phenomenon or a process. We need to understand what’s typical in order to get clarity on what’s not.

1. Storyboarding is a visual exercise. Karen is a huge fan of sticky notes—in fact, 3M, if you are listening, please name a line of Post-its after her. To get started, lay out your story beats on Post-its on a wall or in project management software like Trello or Asana. Trust me, you’ll be moving things around for your entire production process. Make it easy on yourself. 

Measure Your Podcast (37:28-42:17)
Elaine Appleton Grant: Storytellers, I told you we were debuting a new, short segment with this episode – it’s the first of a sponsored three-part series, and I know we’re all going to learn a lot. I want to introduce you to my friend Paul Riismandel. I got to know him because his LinkedIn profile says, “I know how and why audiences respond to podcasts.” That was catnip to me. So the thing that’s always bothered me is that we creators generally don’t…know this. We don’t know how our listeners are responding and we desperately want to and we need to. So Paul will be with me today and for the next two Sound Judgment episodes to help us answer these questions. He’s Chief Insights Officer at the audio research firm Signal Hill Insights. 

So Paul, no matter whether we make podcasts independently, for a media organization, or for brands, and that will include things like large nonprofits, higher ed, companies for profit…basically any organization. At some point, we’re going to be asked, “Should we keep making this?” And pointing to good reviews only goes so far. Downloads, also, so far. The bean counters out there need more proof that branded podcasts help. What do I say to my clients?

Paul Riismandel: Well, so, the evidence that we have so far is that they do. And that’s because we’ve done research. We’ve done research that surveys listeners who’ve heard the branded podcasts, and finding out, What did they think about? How did they respond? Did they enjoy it? Did they not enjoy it? Do they want to listen to more? And this is research that we do to kind of answer these questions, to get at the attention that is paid…That’s how listeners pay us back for the great content, right, is they lend their attention.

Elaine Appleton Grant: Paul, you say it’s really important to think about the research at the proposal stage—at the very beginning stage of making a podcast. Why? 

Paul Riismandel: Because you’re probably going to get asked the question, eventually. That’s why. And it may not even be right away; it may not be right in that renewal, but in my experience, questions start to come up. Making a podcast is a significant investment. Especially to do it well. And even when you have an entire team—whether maybe it’s from the brand, organization, when you have an agency involved—we’re very positive. Very enthusiastic. Very optimistic about it. At some point, the question is likely to come up, and so anticipating the questions that might come up puts you in a better position to be ready to answer them down the line. Or at least demonstrate that you have a plan to do so.

Elaine Appleton Grant: The question that’s going to come up is: How do I know that this has actually helped me?

Paul Riismandel: Exactly.

Elaine Appleton Grant: So Paul, when I talk to new clients, I say, “You’ve got two objectives that we need to be clear on.” One is: “What’s your podcast going to do for listeners?” And the other is, “What’s it going to do for you?” You use—because you’re a researcher—you use the term “brand objective,” where I say, what’s this do for you. Paul, give me an example of a brand objective.

Paul Riismandel: Awareness is a very common brand objective. And that can be very simple, such as you want people to have heard the podcast to be more aware of your brand, just in general. Sometimes maybe a brand has a particular effort that they want the podcast to help spread the word about. So perhaps it’s equity for women, or people of color, and a lot of the content is about that. So we can ask questions around, did people understand that? And did they understand that in relationship to the brand? But also, really, we look to metrics around, Did you find it entertaining? Did it hold your attention? If there are hosts and guests, how do you rate the host? How do you rate the guests? And you can put descriptors, such as, “It was entertaining. It was boring. It was okay,” and see how people respond to those. 

Elaine Appleton Grant: That is fascinating. I would love to know the answers to all these questions as they relate to Sound Judgment, as they relate to the branded podcasts that Podcast Allies makes…I can’t wait to dive deeper into this with you, Paul! In the meantime, what could listeners do to get started on this?

Paul Riismandel: So we’ve gone ahead and set up a special email newsletter specifically on this topic. So just go to “measure your podcast dot com” and you can get signed up and learn more.

Elaine Appleton Grant: “Measure your podcast dot com.” Sounds great. I’m gonna do it right away.

Paul Riismandel: Thanks. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

That’s all for today. Thanks to my guest, Karen Given. I read her newsletter, Narrative Beat, every month, and I think you should too. You’ll find a link in our show notes to narrativebeat.com.

If someone recommended Sound Judgment to you, please follow the show now—and pay it forward. Share it with a friend who loves learning by example, like you do. 

Sound Judgment is a production of Podcast Allies. If you’ve been looking for a listener-first, story-first production partner, get in touch. Our contact info is in our show notes and at soundjudgmentpodcast.com. We’d love to work with you. 

Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Audrey Nelson is our production assistant. Sound design and editing by Kevin Kline. Podcast management by Tina Bassir. And gratitude to the rafts of producers, editors, sound designers, and other team members behind every great story. Without you, the world would be a less beautiful place.