What: A dedicated, facilitated session to produce marketing content and other assets.
How: We walk you through our tools and processes to identify who you want to talk to, when, why and how.
Who: Any open source project or community without dedicated marketing.
Takeaways: A marketing communication strategy, and a plan for how to execute the strategy.
Increase adoption and grow community
Marketing for open source projects and communities is different to marketing for consumer or B2B scenarios.
This workshop helps you define your audience, clarify your message, and help people come to your project and contribute.
Open source projects often struggle to express the value of their offering. The goal of most open source projects is to increase users and thereby, increase user contributions. More users means more potential customers (or hires). More contributions means a stronger community and great business value.
Using our Contribution Marketing Canvas, we work with you to create a contribution strategy. Using our Empathy Maps and Engagement Ladder, we work together to create a plan of execution for the contribution strategy.
Your workshop experience
We’ve developed a tool called the Contribution Marketing Canvas, which helps you answer key questions like:
- What are your project’s contribution goals?
- Who benefits from contributing?
- Why should people contribute, and how?
- Where can people connect with the project and mentors?
Looking at the project goals, we’ll work with you and your team to determine the key areas and activities of contribution that will help your project build momentum towards its goals.
Next, we look at Contribution Flows and start putting it all together. We use the Empathy Map to help understand what motivates your contributors, and then use the Engagement Ladder to start building your marketing and communication strategy.
It’s important to understand that contribution is not the end of the story. Once you have contribution, you need to foster continuous involvement and then aim for incrementally higher value involvement.
The aims of marketing your project are to:
- Ensure the value and sustainability of your project.
- Communicate the value of your product.
- Increase adoption of your product.
- Ensure the health of your community.
- Increase developer contributions.
- Ensure commercial and economic stability, and growth for your community.
Outcomes
This workshop is all about producing marketing assets and content that is ready for review and publishing.
At the end of the session, you’ll have a clear communication strategy for your project, and a clear plan on how to execute that strategy.
You’ll know what stories are important to tell for your project. You’ll have the narratives that illustrate your technology and product, and the narratives that illustrate your vibrant community.
Who is this workshop for?
- Any open source community, association, or project.
- Individuals who have their own open source project.
- Technology companies that have complex technology solutions and don't have a large internal marketing department.
- Small teams, start-ups, project teams ... without dedicated marketing.
Companion workshops
Consider following this up with a Content Sprint, to spend some focussed time on creating content that is underpinned by your freshly minted marketing strategy.