Paving a path for people to produce

Marketing is the process of meeting the demands of the market. For example, many want to learn Drupal, but how do they get there? Not everyone can afford to visit a DrupalCon, some can't see, speak or hear. Everyone has differing needs, and marketing is the role of bringing these two parties together in successful collaboration.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing people in our community but they currently have a tough job finding out how they can help out.

For the last few months I've been working closely with Ben Finklea and a small group of highly motivated people from the worlds of marketing, PR, branding, etc. whom we met after the marketing BoF in Denver (which was a packed room with 50+ people!) in order to work out how we can begin to mobilise this massive, mostly untapped resource. Many of them have already been working hard marketing Drupal for years and it started me thinking about how best connect them with those I've met in Europe.

I had been to many Drupal events around Europe and the U.S. in the last couple of years since I could finally afford to go to my first DrupalCon after five years of not knowing what it's like to be at one. At every marketing BoF we had the same conversations over and over again, the same initial excitement and eagerness, and the same quick drop-off once everyone gets home and back to work, but this all changed in Denver when Ben just got things done, so I'm extremely chuffed he's heading this committee up. I'm also thankful that I was voted in as a community-elected Director of the Drupal Association and was able to get this committee up and running in a far more official way which gives confidence to those who are about to discover what contributing to Drupal is all about :D

With the help of many people a Branding and Marketing Committee was set up, along with its own charter. I thought up a less formal name - DrupalBAM ('Branding and Marketing') and we created a number of initiatives to cover the various areas of the marketing process such as market research which the team have been working on using various tools such as google docs.

We had a BoF and a sprint at DrupalCon Munich - the number one priority was in order to start to scale up the work we've been doing we need to get onto the drupal.org system and with the help of the wonderful tvn we were set up as admins on the existing Marketing Drupal group. tvn took us through some best practices on how to set things up, and I learned a lot about using taxonomies to help organise within the existing g.d.o and d.o structure.

The talented Nico who designed the fab Drupical Drupal events map and calendar came over to help us further with layout and wording ideas in order to make what we have right now super-simple for the non and less technical amongst us. We ended up with one g.d.o group along with four d.o projects for each of the four major DrupalBAM initiatives:

BAM Mission

Promoting the Drupal project to the public at large with particular focus on non-Drupal developers, CMOs, IT decision-makers and other project owners.

BAM Branding

Coordinating efforts around the brand, logo, and other collateral.

BAM Research

Ongoing marketing and competitive research.

BAM Infrastructure

Organizational aspects of the Branding and Marketing Committee.

At the moment I've just set up a super-simple front page for the group listing the four projects along with a one-sentence overview of each. At the moment these links go to blank pages, this is because I am not letting them anywhere near the front page of a d.o project - well, not to start with at least. These pages will highlight the latest work being done and how they can join in and help.

Within each of the projects there are a number of initiatives, for example "competitive research" is part of research. Each one of these is a taxonomy term and have a one-to-one relationship between the terms on the g.d.o group and within the individual projects themselves.

There are a number of people also working on branding material over at the Drupal Branding group. These are people who are already quite familiar with g.d.o and d.o system and are getting on and doing things such as creating branding material to help local DrupalCamps. They are creating a project for each piece of material so, for example if a leaflet needs translation into French issues can be created. This results in hundreds if not thousands of projects so of course not something many of the people who are not familiar with the system can pick up on quickly how to find things, join in, etc.

The goal is to provide a path for everyone who wants to join in our community and contribute to be able to do so with ease - it will take a while to get everything hooked up and in place - do let us know if you want to join in to help - the more the merrier!

Meanwhile, here's a screenshot of the new Marketing Drupal group homepage I've been working on at/since Munich:

Next up I'm creating the sub-pages for each of the projects, then I'll head over to the projects themselves. We'll be making screencasts to show those who don't know the system how to create issues so we can make it easy for anyone to use.

Say for example someone sees a cool Typo3 leaflet and thinks there should be something similar for Drupal. They can post an issue to the BAM Research project where it can be discussed and prioritised, and if created can come back into the system through the BAM Branding project.

The goal is to provide a suitable separation of different roles within the existing .drupal.org architecture in order to get things done in a more scalable way than it is currently, and best utilising the system that has been built up by the community over the last ten years.

By keeping our proven bottom-up approach we can avoid a slow, top-down approach - we know that way doesn't scale in terms of both size and control.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and welcome any to come join us over at the DrupalBAM group. You never know, you might not have to put up with my cheesy acronyms or videos for much longer :D