The Unique Value Proposition of Up My Nursing Game
There’s a reason I’m so ardent about the need for a podcast mission statement. Answering those questions (“who is my audience,” “what problem do they have,” and, “how can I solve it for them”) will help guide you and unlock interesting ideas and value propositions for your listeners. This will make your show stand out.
And one of the most interesting podcast value propositions I know of is from Annie Fulton (RN, BSN, PCCN). Her podcast, Up My Nursing Game, has a very unique value proposition for her listeners: nurses can use it for continuing education credits.
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Let’s rewind for a minute.
This is so interesting to be because I have direct experience with this. My wife is a nurse, and every year she struggles to hit the requisite 30 hours of continuing education so she can renew her nursing license.
It’s because her options are mostly terrible (that’s my official assessment, not hers). Most of the continuing education is long, boring videos of power point presentations.
But Up My Nursing Game is none of that. It’s interesting interviews with people in the medical field, from a currently practicing nurse — someone who’s in the trenches!
Listen to the episodes, take the assessment at VCU Health, and you’ve logged time towards those 30 hours.
This also makes Annie’s podcast very popular. It gets lots of listens from people in the nursing, and wider medical, field. It’s obvious why. She’s making an important part of being a nurse so much easier.
Instead of being stuck in front of a laptop during 30 of your free hours (plus the assessment), you could listen to an episode on your commute to the hospital.
So what can we learn?
The first thing, which I mentioned earlier, is that you should have a rock-solid mission statement.
But the second and third come from her actual workflow.
I will likely be doing a deep dive of Annie’s process because it’s so interesting, but because her show counts as continuing education, it needs to hit a certain standard of quality.
That means when she books guests, they need to sign some papers, she needs to submit each episode to VCU Health for marking them as continuing education, and she needs to create assessments.
She also needs to script parts of her episodes so that she’s ensuring she covers a topic completely, and the answers for the assessments are covered in the episodes.
So the second lesson is that your workflow doesn’t need to follow some prescribed way to create your show. This is obviously a lot of work for Annie, but it’s been worth it as she’s gained sponsors and personal benefits.
However, she’s still a full time nurse with a young child — so anything she can do to improve her workflow would be a huge boon to her.
You might notice that over the course of this year, she’s done a lot more solo episodes. This is to help with her workflow.
When we worked together in 2022, she asked me how to lighten the time commitment and bottleneck in parts of her process. In auditing her workflow, we determined that interviews add even more time to her production process than the typical interview show.
So I asked her if she could do more solo episodes, while still maintaining the show’s status for continuing education.
In the following months, she came up with a workflow that allows her to do just that, and it appears to be going well!
Your third and final lesson: experiment with different formats. If you always do interviews, try solo shows. If you always so solo shows, bring on a co-host to see if it works sometimes.
You might be able to unlock a new type of content that saves you time AND resonates with your audience.
Disclosure: Annie hired me for podcast coaching in 2022.
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