The Power of Podcasting to Champion Change and Empowerment

Chief Executive Women (CEW)

When Ann Burns of Chief Executive Women (CEW) approached Cobox to help her create a podcast to promote CEW’s leadership program and shake up the gender equality space, we didn’t hesitate to help. With a legacy of experience working with Ann, and our own strong belief in the need for gender equality aligning with the CEW mission, we took the lead with our creative expertise.

Podcasts have the unique ability to set agendas and start meaningful conversations, and CoBox is an organisation built on the incredible talent and hard work of many inspirational women. We’ve invested in a range of projects in advocacy and purpose dating back to our award-winning feature Documentary Zach’s Ceremony (2017). Co-creating the podcast with Chief Executive Women (CEW) was putting these core beliefs of the need for social progress to action.

CEW’s leadership program is built around core competencies of what it takes to make a great leader, particularly for women to enhance their skills and progress through traditionally male dominated industries to get them seated at the decision-making table.

The challenge was for CoBox to bring these topics alive in a relevant and engaging podcast. We were entrusted with not only the research, design and production of the podcast, but also its distribution and organic promotion. The end-to-end responsibility allowed us to align with CEW closely and ensure a streamlined experience.

The other challenge was making this podcast stand out in a heavily populated audio landscape that had seen a substantial boom coming out of the pandemic years. The decision was made to uniquely position the series with a strong focus on quality video to supplement the audio and serve as effective social assets for strong organic content in distribution.

Cobox set to work to manage and deliver eight episodes of 20-30 minutes each for the first season of the podcast. This involved extensive market and topic research, building a production playbook, branding assets, and a defined ‘look’ and ‘feel’ for the set and podcast format.
Creative Solutions Lead Sarah Linton was at the helm of this project. She worked with Ann Burns to spearhead the direction of the podcast with her knowledge of CEW’s leadership program and ensuring each episode dealt with poignant advocacy, leadership and development advice and stories. Guests to the series included the renowned advocate and businesswoman Sam Mostyn, award winning dancer and Yellow Wiggle Tsehay Hawkins, and current CEO of Chief Executive Women Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz.

Distribution saw the podcast hit YouTube and all major audio platforms (Spotify, Apple, etc). We generated organic socials posts and promo videos for CEW to have a wide reach on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), and Meta, and we remixed attention-grabbing moments into engaging Instagram Reels and TikToks to further promote the series to a wide audience.

The series has been a steady and consistent success with a regular listenership that puts the Driving the Equality Agenda podcast into the top 25% of podcasts at launch worldwide (buzzsprout). On socials, the series continues to spark conversation and sharing over professional networks, and the podcasts integration with CEW’s leadership program has become a welcome part of the course experience.

THANK YOU for your exceptional support CoBox in the creation of these inspirational conversations. It’s been a real pleasure to travel this journey with you.

- Ann Burns, Podcast Host

Series Lead Producer :Sarah Linton
Series Executive Producer :Aaron Petersen
Podcast Host :Ann Burns
CEW Director, Leader Developer :Sarah Rowley
Production Manager :Elle Zirwanda
Assistant Producers :Cassie Merritt, Taylah Scanlon, William Garing