RFC: Marketing collateral plan

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 04:00:41PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> 
> 
> On 08/04/2015 02:04 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> >On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 12:42:49PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> >>>Just thinking out loud here, but maybe a general one would be about
> >>>Fedora Project in general, covering the community and aspects _other_
> >>>than the distro release? Focus on the Friends foundation, and ways to
> >>>get involved as a non-programmer (it is my impression that many users
> >>>think that one must be a programmer to join the Fedora contributor
> >>>community, which is of course very far from the truth).
> >>If we're aiming the flyers at newbies, I think it's a bit weird to
> >>press them to join in helping make something they don't use or even
> >>fully understand yet, no?
> >
> >I wasn't thinking of it as "pressing", but showcasing all the different
> >interesting and fun parts of the community.
> 
> Whatever verbiage is used, wouldn't such a flyer and accompanying pitch is
> and would be perceived as an upsell? (to convert them from a (not even yet?)
> user to a contributor?)
> 
> There's mutual benefit there, sure, but being a contributor is a much larger
> time investment than trying out the software, and I think it's a bit much on
> top of trying to relay the fundamentals about the software itself. Let them
> try the software and like it first (or not, then don't bother) before
> recruiting them.... and don't distract / muddy the message. If it's a
> conference with booths there's a lot of information they're going to be
> processing at once, my thought is keep the message focused, simple,
> to-the-point as you can for the best impact. I think the message to try /
> use Fedora is more important than to contribute to it at that stage.
> 
> I also don't know that brand-new-to-Fedora-as-a-user folks are going to have
> a great brand-new-contributor experience unless it's through a formal
> mentoring program (like Outreachy or GSoC or whatever where I think we do a
> really good job) and we are not equipped to do that at the volume I'm
> imagining such flyers would be printed at this point in time, right?

These are both important points.  Given that we are planning work on
tools to make this experience, it's pretty clear we've acknowledged
and agreed already this is a gap.  Furthermore, one could successfully
argue said muddying has contributed to a lot of the long tail of our
accounts that belong to people who've never done something for Fedora,
or otherwise gave up early because the on-ramping isn't up to what
they need yet.  So I agree, let's be more focused about these
messages.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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