UTS Impact Studios

Impact Studios is an audio production house that unlocks academic research through engaging and accessible podcasts.

Pitch your Pod

Got a burning podcast idea? We want to help you make it! Impact Studios is calling for podcast pitches from UTS academics to enter our 2025 Pitching Competition.

We’re looking for original and creative ideas with research impact! Solo, team and cross-disciplinary entries are all welcome. Download this guide to making audio for researchers to learn more about how Impact works with researchers to make podcasts.

Please fill out our pitch form before 15 December. In February, we will run a live pitching workshop where you can share your ideas in person with our producers and your fellow UTS research pitchers. We will offer useful feedback and then announce the winning podcast soon after, with a view to producing it in 2025.

Who are we?

Impact Studios is a media production house at the University of Technology Sydney. We tell stories for impact, taking new knowledge from various fields to a broad, engaged audience.

We work with academics, businesses, the community, educational organisations, non-profits, and cultural institutions that want to share knowledge through storytelling.

Our productions are innovative collaborations that transcend disciplinary and professional boundaries to tell compelling stories.

We are part of the university’s research impact strategy. Researchers are increasingly interested in exploring audio and other media to achieve their research impact goals, and we are here to help them do that.

From its beginning as a two-year pilot in 2019, Impact Studios has become an important part of UTS’s advocacy and social justice agenda and is now permanently homed within the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.

How we make Impact

Impact Studios can work with you to fine-tune your research impact story so that it’s ready to translate into a podcast or other media output. We also run workshops on storytelling for impact.

We specialise in audio, turning your story into a high-quality engaging podcast that fits within your budget. If your idea doesn’t fit within the Impact Studios editorial scope, we can also advise you on the next steps for independent podcast production.

We look for podcast pitches that include:

a skilled host
an original idea
engaging storytelling and narrative elements

Our Supervising Producer and Executive Producer will work with you to develop your idea into a series, create a budget and determine a production schedule. We’ll assign one of our skilled freelance producers to work closely with you on the production, a sound designer to mix the final audio and a visual designer to create your podcast tile. We will handle all hosting, distribution, and creative assets such as audiograms, and transcripts (if required). We can advise you on promotion and marketing, but new podcast listeners are usually found through existing networks – so we’ll leave that part to you!

To learn more, you can download our Best Practice Guide for Academic Podcasters here.

Impact Studios has published a rate card to help aspiring podcasters understand the kinds of podcasts we can produce and the costs involved. You can download the rate card here.

For any enquiries, or to find out more, please email or visit the Impact Studios website.
impactstudios@uts.edu.au

Listen to some of Impact Studios’ award-winning podcasts

	Sink or Swim A deep dive into the complexities of swimming, extreme heat, and the community’s relationship place. You’ll hear personal and community stories of triumph and fear, pride and shame and overcoming societal barriers, and you’ll learn about how we can all cope better with the heat in our climate-changing world. Listen here.
	We are Blacktown Portraits of Blacktown community leaders and people working for change. Meet a doctor sounding the alarm about extreme heat, a basketball coach whose players have made it to the big league, a Dharug traditional owner telling the true history of the area's first people, and many more Blacktown legends. Listen here.
	Hey History! A podcast where the kids ask the questions, Hey History! is Australia’s first history podcast for the classroom. Its four episodes are mapped to the school curriculum for primary school kids in stages 2 and 3, and there's a bonus ep on talking about Australian history for primary school teachers. Listen here.
	Care to Share Open and honest conversations with carers discussing the challenges, roadblocks, and joys of caring. Break down the stigmas around care by hearing the stories of people who live this experience every day. Listen here.
	Impact Talks at UTS Bringing you the best of UTS' live events, where our researchers, writers and thinkers explore the issues that matter. Listen here.
	History Lab Impact Studios’ multi-award-wining podcast explores the gaps between us and the past. Each season, we draw listeners into a new investigative process as we try to make sense of the traces the past leaves in the present. Listen here.
	Life’s Lottery: Backing kids Season two of Impact’s Life’s Lottery series, a collaboration with the Paul Ramsay Foundation, explores how Australian society values children and childhood. Kids are our future, but they’re rarely at the centre when it comes to the decisions that really matter. What would it take to truly put kids at the heart of policy, of budgets, and broader public work? Listen here.
	The Last Outlaws The Last Outlaws: In this special three-part season of History Lab, we pull on the threads of one of Australia’s greatest misunderstood histories. This true crime history moves beyond the myths to learn what the Aboriginal brothers Jimmy and Joe Governor – the last men to be proclaimed outlaws in Australia - faced in both life and death. The Last Outlaws won the 2021 NSW Premier’s Digital History Prize, as well as Best History Podcast and Podcast of the Year at the 2022 Australian Podcast Awards. Listen here.
	Black Stories Matter An audio series made up of five groundbreaking conversations from media researchers, historians, former policy makers and Aboriginal journalists on how mainstream media has failed in its telling of Black stories, made with the support of Aboriginal Affairs New South Wales as part of a strategy to improve the dynamics between Aboriginal people and governments. Listen here.
	The New Social Contract A podcast that examines how the relationship between universities, the state and the public might be reshaped as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic. This podcast was made in collaboration with UTS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Listen here.
	UTS 4 Climate UTS 4 Climate brings together leading thinkers from politics, economics, science and journalism to continue the conversation on climate. This podcast features conversations conducted in 2020 by the Honourable Bob Carr, Industry Professor of Climate and Business at UTS. Listen here.
	UTS 4 Climate Now more than ever we need to rethink what research we do, how it’s done and the impact we want it to have. The University of Technology Sydney is filled with award winning engaged and impactful research that’s making a huge difference in the world. Join Associate Professor Martin Bliemel, along with some of the top thinkers at UTS to learn how to deliver excellent research with impact that transforms society and reshapes our world. Listen here.