RFC: Marketing collateral plan

[Máirín Duffy]

On 08/05/2015 04:03 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 04:00:41PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
>>> 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?)
>
> Well, I guess at some level it *is* marketing, sure. Is that inherently
> wrong?

Not just 'marketing' though, an upsell. Maybe I am viewing this all too 
much from the POV of someone with a toddler and daily life choices of 
pick 2: [ sleep | shower | eat ]... but "try the software" is asking for 
a chunk of the person's time, and then to add on "contribute back" is 
asking for a much bigger chunk on top of that.... in the same way that I 
sign up for cable internet (they get some of my money) and they try to 
upsell me to also sign up for cable TV and phone (to get even more of my 
money.)

I think an 'upsell' is a bit more aggressive than basic marketing, and I 
do think 'please contribute' on top of 'please try us' -- to the flyer 
audience, which is mostly newcomers -- is going to be perceived as an 
upsell.

> I've been thinking about our presence at some of the big,
> well-established Linux/Open Source shows — SCALE, OSCON, LinuxCon,
> FOSDEM, etc. Most of the people in the audience have a general
> awareness of Fedora already. They may have tried it, or are even Fedora
> users. I've heard from several people that our presence at these is
> valuable simply to maintain visibility — that if Fedora isn't there, it
> looks like we're not a going concern anymore. I guess I agree that
> there's a little to that, but I'd like us to get more out of the time
> (and expense).
>
> At SCALE in particular, the commercial booths are very much "job fair".
> We aren't playing at that game (although *Red Hat* is!), but over on
> the community projects side, I think showing the fun, interesting,
> cool, useful, meaingful ways to get involved *could* be valuable.
>
> At some of these events, maybe focusing on all of (or one of) the
> Fedora editions might be the best thing, at least especially while the
> idea of cloud/server/workstation is still novel. But at a lot of them,
> I think the users walking by already have a pretty good idea of what
> Fedora is as a distribution, which is why I'd be interested in trying
> to sell the *project* to them, too.
>
> (Now, again, maybe flyers aren't the best way to do that; I don't know.)

While I agree this makes sense, I don't think flyers are the way to do 
that, if for any reason because of the pipeline issues we have that I 
mentioned earlier.

How do you get a savvy, great potential contributor with some knowledge 
of Fedora to get interested in contributing when you run into them at a 
conference? You introduce them *in person* to someone with at *least* 
some remote experience in the same area of contribution the person might 
be interested in working in, the conversation goes well, they continue 
the relationship 'offline' (which is actually online, of course, but... 
you know what I mean :) )

I think we just don't have the pipeline to get someone like that into 
the contributor pool and having a positive experience, at least, not the 
way things are today. And there are way too many opportunities for 
falling off the rails and giving up when you start with a flyer than 
with a real human connection.

I guess in the same way I would rather see us put out no materials than 
poorly-designed materials... I'd rather us not try to onboard a 
potential contributor at all than try to onboard them and they have a 
terrible (confusing, frustrating, dead-end, etc) experience.

The limited case where I think contributor-recruiting flyers can work 
well is, depending on the timing / availability, if we have 'job 
openings' flyers posted for Fedora-related Google Summer of Code, 
Outreachy, or even Red Hat internship opportunities available in the 
booth. Those are programs with strong, well-defined pipelines where we 
have built-in mentorship and a high success rate of productive and 
positive experiences for both sides.

Does that make sense?

~m