Alumni and marketing departments are always on the lookout for new and compelling ways to tell the stories of their institutions and former students. And the story that Dan Morrell and his team stumbled on in 2018 was a real treasure in this sense, spanning decades, multiple countries, and a world war, all focusing on 2 Harvard Business School alumni.

Dan Morrell is the Senior Associate Director of Alumni Communications and Content Manager at the Harvard Business School and the host of their alumni podcast, Skydeck.

He is also a co-founder and partner at Dog Ear Consultants, who we work with a lot here at University.fm.

Dan catches up with host Robert Li in this episode, touching on how podcasting is a natural fit in the alumni communications world, when to try narrative storytelling over the typical interview format, and reflecting on how much the podcast has changed in the 5 years since this episode came out.

The Word on Campus is produced by University FM.

The impact of anecdotal feedback on Skydeck podcast

20:05: We did a story about a fellow who lost his family's fortune while he was at HBS...He told that story on our podcast, and he sent me some of the emails that he got about alumni who heard it, friends of his who heard it, who pulled over to the side of the road in tears, who shared some intimate details about how it moved them. And it reminds me of the value of this medium. It's in your ears; it feels so much more personal, right? And it really speaks to the mission and vision of the podcast, which is the personal side of business.

On the future of Skydeck

30:01: The potential for Skydeck to reach a new audience is very exciting to me. Even a recentering potentially of the podcast itself, like I mentioned this episode, and so many of the narrative episodes, have been such good experiments for us to grow and stretch. But I think there's an opportunity to refocus it and keep the podcast a little bit more narrowly defined. I'm excited about what that could be and how that could reshape our thinking. But I'm mostly excited about how we approach content marketing and how we think about better ways to socialize audio and get younger listeners engaged in what we're doing. Because I think what we're doing is executed at a high level, and I'm excited about figuring out how to get it to more ears.

Reaching new audience through podcast

03:38: My whole career has been about storytelling, like talking to people and understanding where they came from. I get good at talking to strangers, but I think the podcast was a new way of doing that, and not just from the medium; we know it's audio, but I saw the opportunity for a new audience, and potentially a younger audience, but I knew the skill set of my team, and my team's skill set is storytelling, and this was a new medium. We are great interviewers. We've done it our entire careers, so it matched with who we were and what we do, and it was also something that I aspired to be good at; I'd seen it done, I'd seen high execution, and I knew what it looked like. And I just saw a great opportunity there.

• “A Shout Through Time” - Alumni - Harvard Business School
• Skydeck | Podcast on Spotify
• Dog Ear Consultants

Guest Profile:

• Dan Morrell
• LinkedIn - Dan Morrell
• Dan Morrell | CASE
• My Finest Work