Aug 10, 2026 · 9 min · 8 segments
How many of your own donors actually read your newsletter, start to finish? Open rates are declining, and meanwhile podcast and audio consumption keeps climbing. This episode is about meeting donors…
First, You do not have to build this yourself.
Real tools that are already created do it for you.
This isn't a hypothetical workflow.
Google's Notebook LM has a free audio overview feature that turns any document, including a newsletter, into a genuinely natural sounding to host conversation.
There's also Podcastify, built specifically for this, which lets you choose a single narrator voice or a two-host conversational format, and Wondercraft, which is more production-oriented if you want music and sound design layered on top, the kind of tool outlets like Coindesk use for their podcast network.
You don't need to invent this pipeline from scratch.
You need to pick the right existing tool for your team's actual needs and try it.
Second, don't just feed your newsletter in and call it done without listening critically first.
A written newsletter and a spoken piece of audio are different formats written for different senses.
Something that reads cleanly on a page can sound stiff, list heavy, or disjointed out loud.
The better tools in this space already adapt content for listening.
shortening sentences, restructuring a bulleted list into something conversational, but you still need to listen to the output critically before it goes to a donor, the same way that you'd proofread a written newsletter before it goes out.
First, You do not have to build this yourself.
Real tools that are already created do it for you.
This isn't a hypothetical workflow.
Google's Notebook LM has a free audio overview feature that turns any document, including a newsletter, into a genuinely natural sounding to host conversation.
There's also Podcastify, built specifically for this, which lets you choose a single narrator voice or a two-host conversational format, and Wondercraft, which is more production-oriented if you want music and sound design layered on top, the kind of tool outlets like Coindesk use for their podcast network.
You don't need to invent this pipeline from scratch.
You need to pick the right existing tool for your team's actual needs and try it.
Second, don't just feed your newsletter in and call it done without listening critically first.
A written newsletter and a spoken piece of audio are different formats written for different senses.
Something that reads cleanly on a page can sound stiff, list heavy, or disjointed out loud.
The better tools in this space already adapt content for listening.
shortening sentences, restructuring a bulleted list into something conversational, but you still need to listen to the output critically before it goes to a donor, the same way that you'd proofread a written newsletter before it goes out.
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