Public Funding for Made BY Mortals Cic

Armchair Adventurers is a children's podcast series made by older people. The show is hosted by a fictional teenage travel agent called Connie, who together with her customers, all played by over 65s in our local area, take the listener on a journey of the imagination. Each episode is brought to life by 'join-in-at-home' music, movement, drama, and song. Armchair Adventures was forged during the pandemic as a way of helping people stay creative and connected. The programme's mission is to bring older people and children together to share their imaginations, develop storytelling skills, and improve each other's health and wellbeing, while entertaining a global audience. To date, we have: \*Achieved over 65K listens. \*Had recommendations by BBC Radio 4, Podcast Radio, FunKids, and HRH Prince William. \*Charted no 1 children's podcast by Apple. \*Won 'Best Podcast' in [The Manchester Publicity Association awards 2021][0], 'Best Use of Tech by a Non-Profit' in the [Digital City awards 2022][1], and won [British Podcast Awards 2022][2] (Best Family Podcast: Bronze). \*Become Virgin Atlantic's first inflight podcast for children, headlining a two-page spread in their [in-flight magazine][3]. This project's mission is to grow our business by commercialising Armchair Adventures. This project will increase our listens, follows, rates, and reviews, creating two new income streams. Our approach is particularly innovative because it is specifically designed to overcome the challenge of children not owning a device to listen to podcasts. First, we will overcome this barrier by taking an in-person approach to building our digital audience- creating a podcast live show that's engaging for the whole family. The show will tour our local community, helping us to educate and recruit hundreds of new listeners, and generate content for our subscription fan club. Secondly, we will complement this by delivering 'promo swaps'- creating new promotional content and trading space with other children's podcasts and related brands- cross-pollinating listenership and engagements. This will help us to grow our listeners and our followers, attracting sponsorship and advertising revenue (income stream 1), and 'listener giving' through a subscription Armchair Adventures fan club hosted by Patreon- giving listeners access to bronze, silver, or gold premium content (income stream 2). These new income streams will make Armchair Adventures podcast sustainable for the long-term allowing us to develop new products and services within the brand and further grow our business. [0]: https://www.business-live.co.uk/economic-development/full-list-2021-mpa-awards-21935628 [1]: https://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/news/digital-city-festival/2022/03/digital-city-awards-2022-winners [2]: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/2022/winners [3]: https://flywith.virginatlantic.com/content/dam/HelpCentre/ife/refresh/magazine/Vera_July_2022.pdf