The Drupal Association is within the next 3 months or so going to hold its first General Assembly, where new board members are voted in, and a budget for the next year is decided. So I'd like to get feedback directly from the community about what you feel are important priorities for the Drupal Association's marketing efforts in 2008, if possible along with approximate costs. This is a wiki page, so go to town.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is purely a brainstorming activity, and an attempt to get community feedback into the final budget proposal, since I am NOT a market-eer. ;) This proposal will need to be approved by the General Assembly, so there is no guarantee that everything here can be included in the final budget. But by making a strong case, there's a much better chance. :)
Let's try to have this more or less in shape by November 19, 2007 (about two weeks' time).
Booth
A Booth, for shipping around to various events (OSCON, LinuxWorld, SXSW, etc.). This could range from a high-end constructible type of deal like these http://www.midlanddisplay.com/products.asp?cat=52 to a couple of banners like our friends the Joomla! folks use.
Costs
- Design of banners/booth: From free (if we get resources in the community to do it) to ??? (if we get it professionally designed).
- Cost of booth: $2,000 - $5,000
- Printing of banners/posters: unknown; depends on size, colours
- Ongoing shipping costs: unknown; depends on weight
Comments
- Since Drupal is an international product, and we'd likely want representation at numerous events all over the world, it seems like a more light-weight, portable thing is best. My vote would be on producing some nice vinyl banners rather than buying a huge booth kit. - webchick
Misc. Printable Marketing materials
Things like flyers, posters, etc. We could reimburse local groups up to some amount for printing off things at Kinko's or whatever.
Costs
- Design of flyers/posters: Free, if done by someone in the community to ??? if we get them professionally designed (greggles says we already have a nice one below).
- Reimbursement of printing costs: $500 - $600 for 500 card stock quality fliers. Figure 10ish events a year that would have these, $5000 - $6000
Comments
- Could possibly tie design into contests budget (below) - webchick
- CodePositive already has a great flyer - I saw one at DrupalCon Barcelona flickr snap of it --greggles
Misc. Shippable Marketing materials
This covers things like pins, stickers, and so on. We could ship these out to local Drupal meetups/Drupal Camps on request, as well as have them available at various events, including Drupalcon. :)
Costs
- Design of stickers/pins: Free, if done by someone in the community to ??? if we get them professionally designed.
- 10,000 stickers: ??? TODO: check to see where Lullabot stickers were printed from, as they're nice quality
- 10,000 pins: $1,500 from http://oneinchround.com/custom_art_prices.php
Comments
- The thing I'm mostly excited about is Drupal stickers... my laptop is way too boring. ;) - webchick
T-Shirts
While some of the event-related t-shirts might make sense to no longer be available, we ought to have a stock of generic t-shirts to pass out at events, so local DUGs could offer them as prizes, etc.
Costs
- Design of t-shirts: Free, if done by someone in the community to ??? if we get them professionally designed.
- Printing costs: ??? Would need print-on-demand, probably?
Comments
- The other thing we could do with these is sell them in an e-commerce site (see below) for an ongoing revenue stream. -webchick
E-Commerce Site for selling swag
There are lots of times I'd love to get just a plain Druplicon t-shirt as a present for a loved one -- you know, like my Mom or whatever. ;) Or a stack of stickers to brand everything in my apartment -- like my microwave, toaster, and cat.
This is not as easy as it sounds though... while Drupal stores exist with Cafepress and Goodstorm, the international shipping costs are in most cases prohibitive, and we have a very international community. We might need to create our own e-commerce site, which means having someone to develop it, and someone on staff to maintain it. Read a discussion on hosted options.
Costs
- Research into various options for e-commerce: Free, if someone volunteers, or we could potentially pay someone to do this.
- Development of e-commerce site: No idea how to budget for this. :(
- Ongoing volunteer to manage store: ???
Comments
- Something like this might potentially fall under fundraising budget instead, not sure... - webchick
Contest prizes
We could set aside a budget for things like a Theme Development contest, make the best PDF flyer, etc.
Costs
- Depends on number and scope of the contests, but maybe up to $10,000? Is that enough?
Comments
Monthly newsletter
The Association could start organizing a formal newsletter, including advertising spots for interested companies to help bring in revenue.
Costs
- Putting together newsletter: Free, but lots of time involved.
- Soliciting sponsorship: Free, but lots of time involved.
Comments
Educational Video Resources
A series of short 5-minute introductory videos to get people up to speed on the capabilities of Drupal. Ideally, they'd be fairly visual, tightly edited, and be able to give people a snap shot of "What is Drupal?" and "How is it being used to support community?" These could double as educational outreach and marketing materials and be posted online and potentially handed out as DVDs. The scope of the content could be expanded depending on the success and the videos and the ultimate target audience.
Costs
- Time to develop the script, visuals & pitch content
- $500-$2000 for the video and editing
Comments
- x
Travel Reimbursement
We could fly high-profile people in the Drupal community (such as Dries) to events to represent Drupal.
Costs
- $500 - $2000 per ticket, per event. Say one person x 10 events a year, = $5,000 - $20,000
Comments
- x
Please feel free to add your own ideas, make improvements to the existing ones, and fill in some of the costs involved on these things.
Comments
"Made with Drupal"
It's a pretty old trick but what about making available to Drupal builders (and encouraging the use of) some "This website built with Drupal" style referral links. There would be heaps of users of Drupal sites out there that could be reached this way... Maybe even get aggressive and include a small (and easily removable) link by default in the footer of a new install...
Already done! :)
In 6.x, there's actually a "powered by Drupal" block in the footer of new installs. :) You can easily remove it by disabling the block, but for those who don't, we should get a nice chunk of referrals that way.
$300 to print 500 Card Stock Drupal local group brochures
I got a quote for printing the London group brochures in San Francisco. $300 for 500. $15 to score and fold. Take at least a day or two to dry before you can fold. $600 with no notice.
To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield
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Had some comments and
Had some comments and ideas... so first with comments (in reverse order)
Educational Video Resources
Distributed on YouTube for several reasons
(1) Would remove bandwidth from Drupal servers
(2) Allow for easy distributions for Drupal tutorial sites, for companies to provide for employees.
The videos could be prepared for DVD burning for the cost of shipping plus a little extra (or more)
--- I could possibly see someone paying $15 or so for tangible DVD shipped with getting started videos.
--- It could be scaled up and groups like Lullabot could sell full course videos for several hundred dollars
Monthly Newsletter
-- Maybe think of a quarterly newsletter that would have several parts.
(1) Key summary of drupal dev
(2) Tips 'n' Tricks
(3) Advertisement space for people offering drupal services
(4) reviews of products (aka - software / IDE's / hosting companies)
(5) Upcoming Drupal events
Contest Prizes...
This could be a huge benefit and promotion avenue.
Tshirts - Awesome Idea...
Maybe we can also take a page out of the shirt.woot.com playbook. Someone designs a tshirt. Then people have 2 weeks or so to order that shirt. This way an exact number of shirts can be printed making it more economical.
Shippable Materials...
(1) USB thumb drives with Drupal pre-loaded (great for conferences)
(2) STICKERS - Never get enough
(3) Drupal Consultant Business cards... with information about drupal on front/back with a single line for the "consultant" to write his name on it.
(4) Pens with Drupal Info printed on it. Everyone likes to collect pens
(5) A "Who Else is Using Drupal" brochure.... (Sony / Lifetime / MTV / Observer / etc.)
For some strange reason I was unable to "edit" in the wiki regions. Kept giving me a site error contact administrators
The "30 second elevator pitch"
In many cases, you need to explain what Drupal is in 30 seconds. This is called the "elevator pitch", and should be 100-150 words.
This helps convey the message quickly in situation like lightening talks, introducing yourself or your company, ...etc.
Because Drupal is so flexible, we should probably have several variants of this:
There are more of course, but this is a start.
Drupal development and consulting 2bits.com
Personal Baheyeldin
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Two elevator pitches
As part of GHOP, we have 3 elevator pitches, targeted to web admins, managers and developers.
See them here http://drupal.org/node/197220
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
"Drupal audiences"
With any luck the Drupal codebase itself will never see a "fork". On the
other hand the pressure of a widely divergent Drupal user-base is, more or
less, demanding a fork of Drupal's communications/marketing.
To illustrate the problem most Drupal-marketing solutions face:
Sure those groups will have some small cross-interests, but there is an
obvious and significant gap between what each audience will be
interested/concerned about regarding Drupal. As a degreed marketer with some
sales experience (feel like a weenie for dropping that, but feel compelled
to in order to "established credentials"), I feel confident in saying:
Drupal will have limited/lesser success in trying to communicate with all of
its core audiences at the same time, vs. communicating with each one more
intimately.
I guess all of the above would be a long winded way of proposing:
separate_channels_of_communication_for_varying_user_bases. :p
(cross-posted from Drupal dev list)
Please add...
I couldn't edit the doc "illegal choice detected" <-- some formapi issue?
Anyway, please add this:
Procedure for "Request for Funds"
Infrastructure for allowing individuals and organizations to publicly request funding for any of the above categories. In theory, demand for funding in some categories could outstrip supply. New tools on a.d.o would allow users/members to request funding. Allow others to view the requests, and comment as appropriate. Would need to be more like a ticketing system than a forum.
(Added by sime 11/11)
Costs
Comments
What about an ad budget?
I'm not sure if this would be desirable to the Drupal community, but I think a small Google ad budget might be a useful and cost effective way to market Drupal (it seems to be a good way to market everything else, so why not). The key to its success would be to figure out what search terms to purchase, i.e. what questions are people asking where the best answer would be "Drupal" which are not currently returning "Drupal" on the first page of google results for the term? For example, on the first page of a google search for Open Source CMS we get links to a few sites that mention Drupal, and the Joomla homepage, but not Drupal. I would also suggest going after the main consumer CMS' out there.
I'd also like to second the suggestion of better video resources, though I think that other visual resources (graphical descriptions and overviews of Drupal and some popular contrib modules) would also be very useful. But why not put some funding behind some of the efforts to create video resources? For example, with a small budget I'm sure the Drupal Dojo could get and keep many more of its videos online (could pay for a tech to record, encode, and post it, for example).
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
For those proposing videos...
Could you provide some more concrete feedback on what in the http://drupal.org/videocasts is missing/doesn't work for you/etc? The documentation team has been doing some great work lately on making this really refined and easy to navigate, and there are dozens of videos covering a wide range of modules, skills, subject matters, and so on. So I'm curious what specifically you'd like us to spend money on in this regard.
Consistancy in production quality and presentation
The videocasts on drupal.org are indeed a great resource, but it's not exactly conducive for easy discovery. It would be great to have all the vids easily accessible in a portal such as these and/or presented in this fashion on d.o. (videocasts.drupal.org)?:
http://blip.tv/posts?search=drupal&x=19&y=13
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=dr...
In terms of production quality/presentation, this site provides a lot of good examples:
http://www.lynda.com/
There is a lot of parallel discussion happening over at Drupal Dojo - seems like a little bit of funding would enable folks in the Dojo to create a better system for 'live lessons' as well as other formats of complementary learning and marketing materials.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6914
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6739
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6622
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Gus Austin
Can you guys come up with a budget?
What would it take to fund Dojo 2.0?
an idea..
just an idea to start a bit small as I have no idea how much money really exists..
Can we just rip a page from the google playbook and lets fund
DHODP or
Drupal Highly Open Dojo Project
Offer cash and schwag prizes to those that
(a) participate in the Dojo by creating new videos or cleaning up the past videos
(b) clean up the handbook pages by making them more easily accessible
I'll throw a number of $5,000-$10,000 and offering $100-$300 prizes. Of course the administration of doling out the cash is either going to be resource heavy on some unlucky volunteer or require paying someone. Writing out a ton of checks or making paypal payments takes time.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Make an issue
Heya jredding,
Could you please also add this idea to the Dojo issue queue so we have the idea in our list of things to hammer out?
http://drupal.org/project/issues/drupal_dojo
Learn Drupal online at Drupalize.me
Good suggestions
I think Khalid is on a good track with his point about customizing messages, and that's echoed in the response from Caleb. In my own experience in selling services around Drupal, I've found the following to be generally true.
1) Introduce irrelevant information at your own peril.
2) If you're reading, I have 10-30 seconds to grab your attention. If you're listening to me, I have much less time than that.
So that means that people who are in an editing role don't need to know about the great work we've done in the various APIs we have, but the benefit of flexibility provided by that work could be important in ensuring they don't feel locked in. I also think because we have multiple people with whom we should communicate, those materials that lend themselves to different versions cost-effectively would take priority.
I'm not certain about the value a 'requesting funds' system might provide. Perhaps if I understood the use case behind it a bit better.
I have some information oriented towards non-profits that I could offer as a starting point in that category, if someone can tell me where an appropriate place (on the site :)) to put it would be.
Also, rather than google AdWords, we would probably qualify for the Google Grants program at http://www.google.com/grants/
Focus on the goals
Overall Comments/Suggestions
Trying to think strategically, if you want to invest in marketing and comms that will perhaps:
Then maybe such an approach suggest a different way to invest.
I tried to include these notes as an edit to the node rather than a comment, but I got an error message about an illegal choice being detected...
Awesome suggestions, thanks!
The document above is mostly compiling things that have already been talked about in terms of where marketing dollars should be spent, and you're exactly right that to a large extent, this misses the boat entirely on things like outreach to people not sold on Drupal. It's hard to quantify what would be good investments that would help with that though, I guess. Your suggestions are great.
I agree... but..
I agree but a.d.o is a brand new organization and investments are things tracked over time. The a.d.o structure needs to be well defined, roles played out, legal structure in place, as well as record keeping. An investment would be good but how do you track that it was successful? How do you track that it was given to the right people in a compliant manner. Because investments are hard to quantify someone is going to ask why it "hasn't paid off" or "where the money went", these are hard questions to answer for a brand new organization.
I'd suggest a.d.o starts a bit smaller, shorter-term in scope and easier to quantify. The investment in documentation is a good one. Its an extremely crucial area that definitely needs help. Maybe we need a DHOP ;) (as I suggested in a just-slightly-earlier comment)
I think the goals of a.d.o are pretty well flesh out on the association.drupal.org page but, like all things, they'll change with the times.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Can part of marketing budget
...go to help out implementing the #1 asked for feature on Drupal.org? A little bird told me that such funding would probably be necessary to help encourage the number of hours that said little bird (not me, btw) would have to spend implementing such functionality, so that all of the Drupal community could benefit from it.
Printing Vendor San Jose CA
I’m a printing vendor in San Jose, CA and long time Drupal user. Please use me as a contact for marketing material and trade show printing. My company can provide quotes and extend this marketing budge substantially. Thanks.
NickM
Provide contact info
Can you provide external contact info please.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
For the better
I went through the following and found them to be quite in order
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6914
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6739
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6622
Actually things if done in the right way would fetch obvious results. I may make a quick contribution by taking up the graphic designing.
Crashuniverse
http://www.priyaranjan.net
THE Solution
I am someone who researches all the time looking at the new ways to advertise and market things. I suggest you look at the VR66 solution, they are a technology company based in Chicgo. Check out their way of sending TV ads to people (alongside content) as used here: www.TrailerRoom.com
Print
A good rule of thumb is around $80USD per square metre of print. Costs come right down as volume increases.
Phil H
www.displays2go.com.au
Phil H
www.displays2go.com.au