Mr. Sherinian has more than two decades of experience in public relations and communications in corporate, philanthropic and diplomatic sectors both in the United States and internationally. He has held prominent positions at companies and organizations such as Deseret Management Corporation, The United Nations Foundation, Philips Morris International, the Aga Khan Development Network, and the Millenium Change Corporation. He has helped build some of the most talked about milestones in digital global engagement around causes and UN issues over the last few years including the Social Good Summit, #GivingTuesday, Rio+Social, International Day of Happiness, and the Earth To Paris and Earth To Marrakech coalitions.

He is a passionate supporter of efforts to build a new era of global activism and philanthropy among a younger generation that is emerging on the global scene. Aaron was named by PRWeek as Global Public Relations Professional of the Year for 2016-2017 and by PRNews’ as 2017 CSR Professional of the Year. His team won three honors by PRNews as “Association/Nonprofit Team of the Year” in 2012, 2013, and 2015.

A “legacy audience” from a long-running public television show will not necessarily transfer to the world of podcasting.

That was one of the learnings for Jonathan Woodward, the producer of a podcast called “Beliefs.” Developed with Bill Baker, the former president of WNET-TV who helped launch “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly,” “Beliefs” is a collaboration of Religion News Service and Fordham University.

In three and half months, Woodward said, “We’ve gone from understanding that audience does not exist to realizing that our marketing strategy to find (an) audience has to be episode to episode.”

A discussion about progressive politics inside liberal Jewish spaces in Brooklyn, for example, means the audience — “for better or worse” — will be progressive Jews in New York, Israel and a few other communities.

“Since we shifted that audience strategy, it was immediately much more effective,” he said.

Woodward was part of a panel discussion on religious podcasting during the March 19 meeting of the New York Chapter of Religion Communicators Council. The event took place in the offices of United Methodist Women at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Dr.

Joining him were Kevin Childress and Maggi Van Dorn, co-founders of the “Interfaith Matters” podcast of the Interfaith Center of New York. Childress is the podcast’s executive producer and also works as a content marketing consultant for faith-related non-profits. Van Dorn currently is the producer of “Deliver Us,” a podcast about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

A former Catholic high school teacher, Van Dorn had no podcasting experience when she pitched the idea of doing a “This American Life” of religious life to Childress.

That public radio program is considered an obvious progenitor of podcasts, a recent article in New York magazine points out. The magazine’s March 18-31 cover story on “The Golden Age of Pods” reports that some 660,000 podcasts are now “competing for your attention.”

The Interfaith Center of New York already had a blog called “Spotlight” aimed at strengthening relationships with faith leaders. Childress liked the idea of turning that concept into a podcast.

So, four years ago, they bought a multidirectional microphone and an iPad and split up the producing duties. Van Dorn did interviews and learned how to edit; Childress uploaded the podcast to the server and handled all the promotion with the Interfaith Center’s network. By the end of the second year, they had a studio and Van Dorn was working as a full-time volunteer.

For the most part, “Interfaith Matters” airs monthly, Childress said, but with enough flexibility for an occasional hiatus. Three episodes are in development at any given time and can have topical, educational or even a fundraising-related focus. “A lot of our content is focused on the intersections of faith and social justice activism,” he added.

Van Dorn eventually was recruited by Sirius XM to curate religion and spirituality content. To replace her and keep the podcast going, Childress said, “We put the word out everywhere we could and got a huge response.” A volunteer sound engineer, an editor and a host have all committed to a second year for the podcast, he said.

Van Dorn’s current podcast focuses “on the big questions” surrounding the Catholic sexual abuse crisis. “I wanted it to be for a general audience, but at the same time, I had to be realistic about who was really going to be my most engaged audience and who I was creating this for,” she explained. “I’m creating this for Catholics to hold their own faith community accountable.”

She produces “Deliver Us” with her podcasting team at Sirius but had to find a partner, particularly for promotion. America Media, a Jesuit content provider for Catholics, turned out to be the right fit, and provided a pre-existing target audience.

Van Dorn said she was impressed with the level of engagement with “Deliver Us” and the audience interaction through social media and email. “I think we’ve really struck a nerve and people are responding to that.”

Woodward agreed with that assessment. “Maggie works on some really intense journalism which is the gold standard of what podcasting can do,” he said.

“Beliefs,” which covers all faiths with more generalized content, has a different format, he explained. The weekly podcast is designed to provide “fact-checked innovative conversations on current events.”

The objective is to “dial in” on breaking news. “Two weeks ago, we had the guy from the Houston Chronicle on the line and we sat down with him for a conversation about how he broke a story of 700 cases of abuse in 20 years in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Woodward said.

Here are some tips from the podcasting panel:

• Figure out content objectives for the podcast while in the planning stages.
• Use a podcast to “super-serve” a particular community by letting a built-in audience know what the organization is doing and how they can be more active.
• Consider volunteers if there is no budget for a paid staff. The experience will be valuable, but also look for ways to offer small compensation.
• If a studio is not available, record in a room with a lot of books and furniture to diminish echoes. Turn off anything in the room that could make a sound.
• Check out inexpensive options for recording remote interviews. Or, for about $150 an hour, hire a freelance producer to do remote interviews.
• Take advantage of cross-promotion opportunities with guests or other organizations featured in a podcast episode.
• Search online to see how other podcasts are doing underwriting.

Bloom is the assistant news editor for United Methodist News Service.

On Tuesday March 21st, the New York City chapter of the RCC met at the Church Pension Group for its monthly lunch meeting. This month’s speaker was Sarah Pulliam Bailey of the Washington Post. Sarah is a religion reporter and currently runs Washington Post’s religion blog, “Acts of Faith.” Her focus is religion’s intersection with everything, including politics, culture and education.

Sarah began by speaking of her experience as a journalist throughout the rise of Trump. She put forth the question, in a time of Trump dominating the news cycle how do we break through as religion communicators? How do we tell long-term stories that matter instead of reacting to every tweet and scandal?

On Tuesday, October 17, 2017 the New York Chapter of the Religion Communicators Council gathered at the Episcopal Church Center for its monthly lunch meeting. This month’s speakers were Lynnaia Main who is the Episcopal Church’s Representative to the United Nations and Chrysula Winegar of the United Nations Foundation. They spoke about making faith connections at the United Nations.

On September 19, 2017 close to 30 people gathered at the Church of Latter Day Saints for the first NYC RCC meeting this Fall. Ryan Koch, NYC RCC Chapter President, was this month’s speaker. He spoke on best practices for social media with his presentation, “When ‘Like’ is Not Enough”. This month’s luncheon was unique in that it was also a webinar for the RCC nationally.

Ryan began his talk explaining that social media was “free like a free puppy”. While social media is a free resource, in order for it to be successful it takes a lot of work to maintain. He then went on the explain that when creating successful social media campaigns to consider ABCDE: audience, behavior, content, design, and evaluation.

CBS Sunday Morning is always looking for a good story that will appeal to their average audience of 6 million viewers.

“The Harmony Project,” says Dustin Stephens, a CBS Sunday Morning producer, was one of those stories and all it took was a telephone conversation with David Brown – the “inspirational and charismatic” leader of the Columbus, Ohio, community choir – to convince him of that.

Stephens, who accepted a Wilbur Award for the story on behalf of his team during the 2017 Religion Communicators Council Convention in Chicago, spoke about the Harmony Project and CBS Sunday Morning at the New York chapter’s May 16 lunch meeting.

Jane Pauley was the correspondent for the piece. Rand Morrison served as executive producer and Lauren Barnello and Carol A. Ross were the editors.

At the beginning, Stephens expected the Harmony Project story would be a secular one, but, he explained, “the spiritual themes were so obvious that we could not ignore them as we put the story together.”

Beyond that, The Harmony Project worked as a story because of a combination of elements: the volunteer choir that is helping unite a community; the choir’s founder, who has a compelling personal story and the outreach at a women’s prison, where a smaller choir is formed.

“What we look for in Sunday Morning, and this is true for most newsmagazine shows, is not a particular event or a particular person but layers of complexity to a story,” Stephens said.

Of course, in today’s multi-platform media world, the full video story is just one piece of the puzzle. On story like this, he explained, they would provide an excerpt for the Columbus, Ohio, CBS affiliate to air; create an item for the CBS website to tease in advance and prepare some “web extras” for parts that did not make the final cut to post the day of or day after the broadcast.

Sometimes, the correspondent will do a brief live promo with the local affiliate. An article must be written for the website and if there was an impact, a follow-up piece is needed.

In this case, there was an impact. Since the story’s debut on CBS Sunday Morning, the Harmony Project has received more than $100,000 in grants and donations, Stephens said. With a waiting list of 800 potential choir members, there are plans to start a second choir and the group has moved to a larger space, a local stadium, for performances.

“David Brown writes to me that since the story aired, about 30 other cities have reached out to him about starting their own version of the Harmony Project, so he’s consulting with them,” Stephens added.

On March 21, 2017, the New York Chapter of the Religion Communicators Council met at the Church Pension Group for their monthly luncheon. This month’s speaker was Tom Gallagher, the new CEO of Religion News Service (RNS). Gallagher spoke about his experience reporting on religion, the importance of religion reporting, and looking towards the future for the RNS.

Tom Gallagher started his presentation by giving his background. He had originally worked in finance and in 2009 began work at the National Catholic Reporter, where he wrote about domestic and foreign affairs.

He spoke about his experience in April 2016, when he traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan to cover New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s pastoral visit to displaced Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities. He discussed this significant experience and connected what he saw to the situation in Iraq today.

Newtown originated with Odyssey Networks in the weeks after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and is now a coproduction of Transform Films, Odyssey Network’s independent film production company.

Carol Anne showed the trailer of this film and went on to explain that the original idea of the film focused on the theme of who heals the healers, particularly focusing on the clergy of Newtown. As the film evolved the focus became on how gun violence has long reaching effects and how it affects the entire community. She then discussed Odyssey Networks future impact campaigns, which would use this film as an educational tool. The film will be used by groups to begin a discussion about gun violence, as well as how to reach out to communities healing from trauma.

Besides the feature-length film, short form documentaries have also been created. Carol Anne shared that these include a film about a Reverend from Scotland, who experienced a similar tragedy in his community, that reached out to a Reverend in Newtown.

There is also a short film that touches upon urban gun violence. Carol Anne showed a brief film clip entitled “We are all Newtown,” which features Sam Taylor from Hartford, Connecticut. His son was shot and killed shortly before the Newtown massacre. He points out that gun violence in urban communities is often times underreported and that we must recognize all victims of gun violence. The meeting ended with a brief question and answer session about the film.

To learn more, please visit the Newtown film website.

Susan Sparks has made a career – make that several careers – at the intersection of religion and humor.

Her philosophy, honed through a personal journey that has taken her from trial lawyer to standup comedian to pastor, is a simple one:

“If you can laugh at yourself, you can forgive yourself and if you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others.”

Sparks, who leads the historic Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Manhattan and still occasionally takes the stage, was the featured speaker at the Sept. 20 lunch meeting of the New York Chapter of the Religion Communicators Council. The event took place at the Episcopal Center, not far from where world leaders were convening at the United Nations.

During its February meeting, the New York chapter hosted Tony Carnes, editor and publisher of the web-based A Journey through NYC Religions. The meeting was held at the offices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which will be one of the venues for RCC’s upcoming 2016 Convention.

Journey is devoted to exploring religious life in every pocket of New York City. A small team of up to four people sets out regularly to any given neighborhood or district across the city’s five boroughs: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. There they identify houses of worship, interview members and leaders, and record celebrations and events. In 2015, Journey posted 159 articles and 60 videos based on these neighborhood visits.

Carnes said Journey has had more than 31 million views in five years and currently gets about 900,000 views per month. He attributed the interest to what he described as the rapid growth of religion in New York City and the great “media opportunity” that growth affords.