When I founded the podcast awards, little did I know the passion podcasters would have about the People’s Choice Podcast Awards. Throughout the past 11 years, millions of podcast listeners have nominated and voted for their favorite shows each year.

The awards have been very much a project of passion. And while at times they were supported through financial injection of my personal company, I have remained committed to providing a transparent venue for podcasters to be honored by their audiences and peers.

While other awards have popped up and are special in their own way, the People’s Choice Podcast Awards is unique in that the fans drive the awards process.

As most know, I attempted to divest myself from the awards in 2014 by selling to the New Media Expo. As many witnessed there were serious issues with the transition, and the awards ceremony masters of ceremonies actions culminated into something not worthy of the fans and the awards itself. Little did we know that the New Media Expo would disappear and sadly not be able to complete the transaction for the podcast awards in 2015.

So here we are. I have never been one to walk away from something, and I am not going to do that now. I realize that Podcast Awards is going to need a serious re-work of the site itself, a complete revamp of the rules and awards processes. And I’m going to need your thoughts and ideas.

I have come to some decisions on how I will proceed. I will run the 11th annual Podcast Awards with the current site and infrastructure while at the same time we will run a GoFundMe campaign to raise the $25,000 needed to rebuild, restructure the site. I will also appreciate your thoughts and ideas as we rebuild Podcast Awards.

Before nominations open this year, I will completely restructure the rules and process of the awards with input from you, our trusted members of the podcast community. But I want to make one thing very clear: the People’s Choice Podcast Awards will remain in body and soul a podcast-listener event.

No awards process is perfect, to be honest a perfect process does not exist and whatever we come up with someone will bitch about it. That said the existing process can be improved significantly.

Things up for consideration:

• Minimal Show Registration Fee
• Rules
• Categories
• Listener Nomination Period
• Peer Nomination Period
• Nominated Shows Review Process
• Slate Determination
• Annual Podcast Legends Award
• Steering Committee
• Nominated Fairness Doctrine
• Voting Process

I look forward to your input. And look forward to rolling out the new process by April 1 and opening Nominations by April 15.

Update, we have launched the GoFundMe Campaign.