My experiences at the Drupal Marketing Sprint at DrupalCon Vienna

29 September 2017
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Yesterday I was very glad to have been invited to the Drupal Marketing Sprint. It was organised by Michel Van Velde with assistance from his colleagues at One Shoe including Margo Alderliesten (Marketing & Communications) & Jeroen Schoenmakers (Digital Consultant) that were also in attendance.

The session started with introductions as we went around the room. I was surprised to see that we had attendees from Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, the USA, in addition to myself from the UK.

Idea extraction

The format was structured in a way to get tangible marketing material created by the end of our 4 hour session. We began by writing down ideas on post-it notes and then putting them on the wall. Once this was done, we went around the room and pitched our ideas.

After we were done pitching our ideas, some of these began mini discussions of people asking for clarification, or agreeing that the issues were also relevant for them.

Idea selection

Next we were given red dot stickers which were the equivalent of 3 votes to narrow down the post it notes that were on the wall. After voting on these, we selected those with the most votes and used them as a basis to create 2 groups to work on each marketing campaign.

The groups

You can see both of our groups in the photo below.

Group 1: examples of Drupal websites in the publishing industry

Group 2: mapping the Drupal Buyers Journey / Guide

The group I was in was given the task of writing a blog post aimed at giving examples of Drupal websites in the publishing industry. The intended audience was decision makers that worked in publishing to address their pain points and give them confidence that Drupal is a the right choice for them.

We began by coming up with ideas on what our content would be, how we would make it engaging and creating a structure. After a period of discussion and research, different team members were given roles such as Margo creating a google document that we collaborated live on, and Lara & Dominik began writing points on paper.

Lara Knebel (pictured below in black) works for publicplan who provide Drupal websites to a lot of government organisations, brought insights from selling to government and requirements that fed into our points on content editing experience and workflow moderation. We were also lucky to have Dominik Kipar (pictured below in the white t-shirt) from Hubert Burda Media, a large German publishing company, so he was able to provide us with valuable insights into the painpoints of publishers from his day job.

After lunch I went away to join a session. When I returned I was very happy to see that Dominik’s colleague, Julia Pradel, (Community Manager at Hubert Burda Media) had joined our group as well, bringing her experiences of working on the Thunder project (a Drupal distribution for publishers) with her. Stella Power, CEO of Annertech (an Irish Drupal agency) had also joined with her colleague Mike King, Project Manager.

I was also glad to see that we had also enlisted the skills of Anna Nest, Communications Manager of Undpaul (a German Drupal agency). Unfortunately we ran out of time, but hope to collaborate and publish our article soon.

Meanwhile, the other group had been beavering away and created the Drupal Buyers Journey / Guide. The team was led by Nathan Roach, Content Director at Axelerant.

Here is a screenshot of the spreadsheet that they created during the session.

Thank you so much to the One Shoe team for organising such a great initiative for the community. I look forward to attending another one soon.