Blogging your way to Drupal event success

I've been pretty cynical in the past about blogs. I am now a convert.

For Drupalcon we identified over 70 blog posts that helped drive awareness and ultimately successful fund raising and successful attendance. For the recent Drupal testing sprint in Paris, France we used the same technique.

What worked for the testing sprint was trying to justify the expense and working on the anticipated outcomes of the sprint. We used blogging to raise awareness and attract sponsors ultimately raising funding for 8 people to attend Paris.

While blogging was originally a fund raising effort it's clear it helped improve the quality of the sprint itself, because so many of the issues and topics were being worked out in researching the blog posts and reading each other sprinters blog posts.

We started here with the announcement here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/9516 and funding plan here http://groups.drupal.org/node/10382

Then started blogging here: http://acquia.com/blog/kieran/how-test-20-000-drupal-7-core-patches

Then I worked with each individual attending the sprint to document their particular contribution in advance:
http://www.kevinbridges.org/dcov
http://www.kevinbridges.org/node/144
http://blog.boombatower.com/core-patches-need-to-update-tests-as-well
http://blog.boombatower.com/update-on-paris-coding-sprint
http://blog.boombatower.com/thanks-for-fundraising-paris-coding-sprint-u...
http://cwgordon.com/google-sponsors-two-drupal-developers-to-testing-spr...
http://acquia.com/blog/goals-testing-code-sprint-paris
http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/139
http://blog.boombatower.com/wants-to-goto-paris
http://www.kevinbridges.org/node/143

And finally requested they blog during the sprint so there was a solid record to report back to funders:
http://buytaert.net/a-test-framework-in-drupal-7
http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/143
http://cwgordon.com/paris-simpletest-sprint-day-2
http://www.kevinbridges.org/node/147
http://symbiotix.net/node/101
http://cwgordon.com/paris-simpletest-sprint-day-1
http://www.drupal4hu.com/node/142
http://www.kevinbridges.org/node/146

There was a lot of planning and strategy that went into making the sprint successful. Blogging was the most visible aspect of that strategy and it was once again successful.

Kieran