It all started with a podcast. Early in the spring of 2021, I was introduced to Jeff and his team at Chat with Leaders as a potential guest for the podcast. As the B Corp expert in Georgia, I’ve been asked to appear on numerous podcasts and speak about B Corps, B Local Georgia, and the overall market shift to a stakeholder-focused form of capitalism.

After a planning call and the podcast recording, Jeff and I continued to talk. As a volunteer-driven organization (myself included), B Local Georgia often needed help finding the bandwidth to create relevant content and build our audience. Hard work and networking have gotten us so far. Still, I now had two universities looking for student projects and an ambition to expand beyond that. I needed new companies to seek certification to achieve the exponential growth I was picturing.

With a minimal advertising budget and an aversion to “hard-selling” the B Corp movement, I asked Jeff about the possibility of creating our podcast. Why not let our CEOs, leaders, and trailblazers talk about why this movement matters, its bottom-line effect on their businesses, and the positive change they wanted them to be a part of?

We’ve now recorded seven episodes, and Jeff guided me on the process, how to prep, and how to be an engaging host. Most importantly, as an incredibly busy person, he’s helped me and my volunteer board produce authentic and engaging content that is growing our audience, spotlighting my members, and driving demand for B Corp certification in the Peach State.

Since that first episode I appeared on in early April, we’ve grown our LinkedIn followers by 118, an 18% increase. Organic impressions have risen from around 2,000/month in April & May to over 9,000 in August, and we’re averaging around 7% engagement on our posts, up from 3% in Q1. And most importantly, this Fall, we have eight company projects running in universities and five soon-to-to B Corps awaiting official certification. Five more (that I can directly attribute to our efforts) are actively working towards certifying.