 All right, so I'm here this morning to chat with you about marketing Drupal. And I'm really thrilled to be here at Bad Camp. So thanks for having me. And I hope everyone's having a great morning. Hope you've all got your tea and your coffee. And yeah, looking forward to this conversation. And I hope that this is a conversation. So I'm gonna talk for a while and then I'll be happy to take questions. But also ideas. So if this brings ideas to your mind, I would love for you to be able to share them at the end. So since I got involved in the Drupal community many years ago, I've heard lots of stories about Drupal as I'm sure you have as well. Whether you're just starting out with the Drupal or whether you've been using it for years, just when you think of the word Drupal that surely brings stories to mind. And it might be stories of people, it might be stories of what you can do with Drupal or it might just be the first words that pop into your head when you hear that word Drupal. Like what does that really mean to you? And I think when we think about marketing Drupal often it's in the context of, oh, I have to talk to a client or I'm going to a conference and I have to talk about Drupal. And we're thinking about it as kind of like this business need but really marketing is about storytelling and so I think it's good to step back and reflect and think about what are the stories that we tell about Drupal, what are the stories that we tell ourselves? What are the stories that we tell other people? What does it bring to mind? So I think there are some kind of marketing stories that we hear a lot that we kind of words that we try and use to describe Drupal to sell it. And these are some of the stories that are really good to tell. And so I often come back to the same kinds of things when I'm talking about Drupal, I always try and show people how it can be really simple to use that has really good authoring tools because I think that that's a story that doesn't get told often enough. It kind of has a bad rap maybe for being difficult to use. I think a lot of people talk about how flexible Drupal is. This is the thing that I know people tend to agree on that for maybe the difficulties in using it or I mean the difficulties in being onboarded onto it, it has this great flexibility. So it's like it's worth it. You should use Drupal, it's really flexible. So that's a story I think that's pretty ingrained in people. We also tell the story of security because I think open source in general, people are a little scared about, if there's no company behind this, how can it be secure? If it's open, how can it be secure? And so we often tell the story of how Drupal is really secure. This is security team behind Drupal. We talk about the security team. We talk about all the contributors and everyone testing Drupal all the time and how that makes it more secure. So that's a story I hear again and again from the community. And then one of the stories that I really love about Drupal is it's emphasis on accessibility. And I love this story because it's not just us saying, repeating the fact that Drupal is accessible, Drupal is accessible, but I actually see from people I work with in Drupal how much people really care about accessibility. And it's not just accessibility experts who care, but actually people who are working on all parts of the software. So for example, you might have used the new layout builder in Drupal. Well, when the layout builder was being built, there were a lot of conversations about, how do we make the backend of this accessible? It doesn't seem like anyone's done this before. This is a real challenge, but like let's make sure we deliver with this. And this was a big priority. And so I love the fact that Drupal, people really care about this. And it's not just an afterthought or like something we have to check off on the list of pre-launch features or something. Another story that I've started to hear more often, and I've heard this from inside the Drupal community, but also from people who are a little bit more on the edge, you know, people who are maybe not really involved in Drupal, but they have a Drupal website that they're running. And they're starting to say that, oh yeah, I've heard Drupal 9 is really easy to upgrade to if you're already on Drupal 8. And it's gonna be a really smooth transition. And that's a really important story to tell because this is a story that you need to tell as people are facing this decision about what to do next. You know, I'm looking to redesign my site should I move to Drupal 9. And so it's important for people to feel like they can trust that Drupal is gonna be easy to upgrade to. And so that's a story that I think needs to be told again and again and again to reassure people as they make these decisions in their process. And then I think that we also tell some stories around different users, user types, different types of sites. Drupal for a long time has had a lot of momentum in a few different industries, a few different verticals, including higher education and government. And in the higher education space, it's I think been really successful that from one institution to the next, this idea that Drupal is a really good platform specifically for higher education, that story's been told a lot of times. And I think that one of the reasons that this has happened is because in higher education, there tends to be a lot more sharing between organizations. So I mean, I'm in Canada and maybe there because there are fewer colleges and universities here, but people tend to really share a lot. They'll talk to other schools, but I think it's kind of universal and they'll share best practices about, oh, this is how we set up Drupal. This is how we're hosting our sites. This is how we onboarded all of our content editors and they'll actually share a lot between each other, not just in the context of a DrupalCon, but actually just as part of their regular day-to-day work, which is really great to see. And then I think there's also some more kind of aspirational stories we can tell about Drupal, like getting people excited about the innovation behind the platform. This is something that maybe doesn't get a lot of press because Drupal has been around now for almost 20 years. And so we think of it as something that's very stable, actually, which is great, but it's also important to tell the story of innovation. So if you're using some kind of off-the-shelf CMS that's maybe bought or something, you're not necessarily gonna be this push to innovate, but because Drupal's open source and so many people are using it, it's being innovated on all the time. The community's innovating. So as an organization, you can benefit from that innovation even if you didn't realize that you needed those features. And I think people really like this idea of having a stable platform that's still innovating. And Drupal's found a great way to do that, the way that we have our release cycle now and it's a good story to tell too. And then it's always good to tell stories that are kind of newsworthy. So if you're trying to get people to share stories outside of the Drupal world and really get people excited about something, you have to talk to them about what they're interested in. And I remember a time back six months ago when basically any story that you had to share, if it wasn't related to the current news of the day, you know, it's not going to get shared. And so it's really important to relate to people. And I think one of the great stories of Drupal in recent times is that Drupal's used a lot in government, higher education, healthcare. It's used a lot in the nonprofit sector. And so in these organizations, we're the ones having to respond to COVID very quickly to kind of change how business works or get the message out or get new applications up and running to figure out, you know, how are we gonna respond to this crisis, to this pandemic? And so a lot of organizations that had to respond to COVID are using Drupal and we're able to respond quickly because Drupal is really flexible and you can build out new things really quickly. And that's one of the reasons I started using Drupal because you can build things out really quickly, but it's exciting to see that in action and it's actually really inspiring. So there's a lot of stories actually that you can find on Drupal.org about how different organizations responded and the role that Drupal played. So these are all stories we can tell when we're trying to share, you know, why should you use Drupal? Why should you care about Drupal? Then there's also stories that we tell ourselves. So I think most of you here, you're at bad camp, you're in the Drupal community. I think you're a part of the Drupal community. So what stories do we tell ourselves about Drupal within this community that we call Drupal? So I think that it's really important to focus on these internal stories because if we're just marketing Drupal as software, like Drupal is the CMS, Drupal is this platform, you should use it, that's limiting because there's lots of other software, there's lots of other CMSs and why should somebody care about Drupal in particular? So one thing that obviously Drupal has that other software doesn't have is it has this community behind it. And so telling stories that come from the community it's gonna show how unique Drupal is. It's gonna bring so much more depth to this identity and this brand. And so I don't think we should shy away from community stories. And one of the great community stories that I think we should talk about a lot is diversity and inclusion. There's the diversity and inclusion initiative as part of the Drupal community, which is very active in promoting inclusion in community events, in welcoming new people on the Slack channel. And there's new programming coming out of that group. There's also initiatives coming out of the Drupal Association to promote diversity and inclusion. So I don't know how many of you were at DrupalCon but there were scholarships for DrupalCon beyond anything in the past that at DrupalCon Global where people were invited from certain groups like ladies learning code type organizations and different schools and basically groups of people who wouldn't have otherwise known about DrupalCon or been invited to come. And so that scholarship program really expanded the number of people who could come to DrupalCon could be exposed to the community. There's also a new talent development program coming out of the Drupal Association to take some of the Drupal training programs that already exist and make them available through scholarships to people who are usually underrepresented in well, the Drupal community but also the open source community at large. So that's exciting. I think that we should talk about this and make it a priority and not just obviously we should do take action and then we should also tell that story. And I think that's a big part of the identity of Drupal. I also think that it's really important to recognize the contributions of everyone. So we are in a community that relies on contribution, right? So we're relying from day one on people who have contributed their time to write code for the Drupal project but we're also relying on the efforts of lots of other people who do lots of other forms of contribution like project management, design, marketing and then also event organizing the people who run Bad Camp, right? And so by talking about these types of contribution I think we're building a stronger community and just by recognizing all those people where we have a stronger community to tell a story about. And so I think in our own community there's some recognition like you can go onto Drupal.org and kind of see, oh, this person has community credits or if you watched the Drees note for many years Drees has always had this big tag cloud of contributors which is nice to see people being recognized. But more recently there's also been more storytelling around contribution which I think is arguably more valuable to actually say, hey, here's this group of people and this happens to be the team from Lullabot who's creating the Olivera theme and like, hey, let's put a spotlight on these contributors and tell the story of what they're bringing to the community. And I think telling those stories that are more related to people is always easier to relate to. It's always inspiring. And so I think this is what needs to come out of the community and also be spread even further. Another story you might not have heard so Drupal 9 came out not too long ago and there's this website celebratedrupal.org that was created for the launch. I love how this project came together, Dan Lemmon and a group of others came together to just create this website and make sure it got launched so people could have a place to celebrate online. So we can tell stories about the community and we can make those stories stronger. We can tell stories about Drupal the project and we can figure out how to weave a story that's really inspiring and we can spread that. But I think it's also important to really reflect on who we're talking to. So when we do marketing in general, we often think about our audience or usually our audience is. And in terms of Drupal, it's always been a difficult thing to pinpoint because it's an open source project and anyone can use it. So who are we talking to? Well, aren't we talking to everyone? Yes, but in marketing, it's important to actually pinpoint your audience. It's important to pin down who you're talking to. Otherwise these stories you tell or just the words you use, they're gonna be less effective. So how I would describe Drupal to someone I meet at a party is gonna be different than how I describe Drupal to a potential client or to a developer who I'm trying to convince, hey, you're into this WordPress thing, but why not Drupal? So I really need to be able to pinpoint who I'm talking to and then tell a story that actually suits them. So we need to take a step back and think about who these audiences are. And there are many. So if you go to DrupalCon, for example, where there are people who are in the community, but there are people who are really brand new, you'll meet all kinds of different people for different backgrounds. You'll meet salespeople, you'll meet marketers, you'll meet front-end developers, you'll meet people just evaluating Drupal for the first time. And that's at a DrupalCon, even when you're already kind of one step inside where somebody's really interested in this project. So I've had the chance over the years through, well, through running a Drupal agency, but also through running a Drupal training program to meet a lot of individuals who are encountering Drupal for the first time. And I think it's nice to think about the user journey that somebody takes when they're first discovering Drupal and just to try and get a sense of the breadth of different types of journeys that there are. So I have a few user journeys here and these are just quick snapshots, so I'm not gonna go into all the detail, but we can think of site builders, developers who are really new, they're testing out Drupal, maybe they have a small project, and think about what kind of pain points they might run into in their journey of going from brand new user to getting their site online. We can also think of project managers, often in a bigger organization, there's someone who's non-technical, but who's still really involved in a Drupal project, and maybe they're managing a team and they are trying to figure out the best practices for Drupal, or they're trying to figure out if I switch over to Drupal, what do these best practices look like or how do I actually get my site deployed? Then there's developers who are really experienced and they know all kinds of technical things, but they don't really know the Drupal lingo and they're trying to assess maybe if this platform a good fit. I have to tell my boss if I think that we're gonna be able to do this upgrade to Drupal 9, and I'm trying to figure out just simple things like what's the difference between a block and a view. Then I think we also have more users who are more worried about content and marketing and they're thinking of Drupal as a marketing platform and how do I integrate with all my marketing tools and how do I just get a demo of Drupal running so I can see if this is going to work for me? And then beyond all those users who we can think of them as more hands-on users, we also have a whole set of users who come to Drupal as evaluators and they're not going to ever install Drupal. They're not even gonna think about it. They just saw Drupal on a list of CMSs that was proposed and they wanna know if this is actually a good option for their organization. So to them it's maybe less about the technology itself and more about the use case and this list of features that I need to respond to or the list of features that I'm gonna have next year that I don't even know about yet. Where is Drupal going? And that's how the evaluators may be thinking about this problem. And evaluators also think about things maybe at another level up from even that. So they're assessing Drupal as this platform but they're also thinking about change management. Like how do I onboard my whole team on this new, on this technology that we're gonna adopt or what's the cost of ownership? Who's gonna maintain this thing? These are really important questions to ask. And as a community, we're not always able to answer them but I think we need to address them in some way when people come to Drupal to ask what is this and why should I use it? So this brings me to some, what do evaluators say? So recently as part of the promote Drupal initiative we ran an evaluators survey. And the real focus of this was people who are evaluating Drupal and not necessarily picking Drupal. So some people have over the years decided to switch to another CMS or they thought about using Drupal but they decided on something else or maybe they used Drupal but they really had to fight hard for it. And so how are these evaluators, these kind of more executive level folks, how are they approaching Drupal? And what do they say? So we got some feedback and we're kind of processing it, figuring out what to do next and here's just a few snippets. So one thing that we heard a lot is that people really want to have a platform that has a lower cost of ownership and that is easier to evaluate without doing an install process. So evaluators wanna be able to just see a demo get something up and running quickly and then they wanna know that it's easy to upgrade, it's easy to install and it's easy to do these security updates. And so that's something that really came up a lot, changes that would actually be needed maybe in the platform itself or just in being able to get a quick demo up and running. And then the other thing that we heard a lot from these evaluators is that they wanna have more material which to me sounds like storytelling. So yes, we heard that they needed more documentation but also demo sites and case studies and someone even said propaganda debunking Drupal myths. So I've been telling lots of positive stories about Drupal. There's also lots of stories that say Drupal card and this and that. And so how do we actually fight that with some more propaganda to or marketing materials to help people? And I think some evaluators are evaluating Drupal and then they're making a recommendation, right? So how do we help them make that recommendation? How do we help them, you know, write that, make that presentation to their boss that says, here's why we should use Drupal even though you heard XYZ. And I think we can take a lot of these findings about what evaluators think and there's so much low hanging fruit where we can make improvements. So when you think about how somebody first does their research, they're going on and Googling, what is this Drupal thing? Let me dig into the details a bit. And they come across Drupal.org and they might come across Drupal.com and they might not find exactly what they're looking for because there's so many people that Drupal.org speaks to and evaluators aren't necessarily at the top of that list. So I think that's exciting because there's so many improvements that wouldn't be easy to make. So what can we actually do with all this? So I'm telling you, tell great stories, you know, work in the community to tell better stories internally so we can amplify that out. And also we should think about who we're talking to, of course, but what can we actually do? Like what can we get together and improve? Because there's so many things. So this is where I'll introduce the Promote Drupal Initiative, which started a couple of years ago. It's a group of people in the community. I would, I say marketers, content writers, translators. There's also a lot of developers and agency leaders and folks who aren't necessarily marketers by training, like myself, but who are very eager to spread the word about Drupal and expand the community into new markets and new communities. So this group has been working away and working with the Drupal Association. So we do have some things that we can share with you, which are exciting that I think a lot of people just aren't aware of. So I'll start with that. So there is actually a brand book for Drupal. Very exciting. There is a document that describes the Drupal color palette, the typography to use, but also the tone of voice and kind of imagery. And we don't see this all the time when we look at Drupal because there was just so much about Drupal that's been developed by the community and organically, but there is a brand book and there is value in developing that brand, I think, and using it. There's also a great video for Drupal. I'm not gonna play it now because I don't think it's gonna go well on the top end, but you go watch it. It's on the Drupal Association YouTube channel. It pumps up Drupal a lot. There's also been a lot of work around the launch of Drupal 9. There's a landing page about it on Drupal.org, but there's also a nice press release and this one-pager back sheet, so this is one of those great things like send to your boss, like what's this Drupal 9 thing about and what does it mean for us? There is a pitch deck that was created a couple of years ago and it contains a lot of case studies, but also just a lot of just like why Drupal kind of content. And I like this pitch deck because a lot of people contributed to it and anyone can use it. So even if you're not the one who built all these projects in Drupal, you can use case studies to support the fact that, yeah, Drupal's great for this museum project or Drupal's great for this health care project. And another initiative that's really in its infancy that's coming out of Promote Drupal is this idea of having a Drupal presence at other conferences outside the Drupal space. So a few months ago, I participated in a higher ed conference. It was actually happening at the same time as DrupalCon, DrupalCon Global, and it was an opportunity to have a boost that we used and it wasn't my company name on the booth, it was Drupal on the booth and we were just trying to promote Drupal to these higher education folks who maybe were at herd of it but hadn't really considered it or weren't sure what decision-making factors to think about. So that's an exciting opportunity that we can actually get together as a community and promote Drupal actively to other groups. And I think this needs to be probably agency driven because agencies are good at going to conferences and promoting things, but of course, this idea could go anywhere just a way to spread the Drupal brand more selectively. I mentioned this evaluator survey and coming up with personas. So we are in the process of taking these survey results, maybe digging a little bit deeper with some interviews and then seeing how that should impact a strategy for the evaluator onboarding process, like how should evaluators interact with Drupal? Should they get these email newsletters or what should happen when they go to Drupal.org? Where should we send them? So that's an exciting project. And I think a lot of marketing is actually like when you dig into it, it's really all about coordination and being consistent. And if you have these stories and you wanna get them out and you want a consistent tone of voice, well, you need some kind of project management behind that. So setting up a real Drupal marketing calendar that we can use that can be used by the Drupal Association but also by all these agencies who are already eagerly marketing Drupal or all these local associations or event organizers who are also promoting Drupal in more local communities. So this is an idea to kind of help us all coordinate our efforts and maybe help us spread the same stories so we can all get more out of the same material but it does definitely take some project management and coordination. So that's something to work on. And I also just wanna mention that there's been a lot of contribution from translators. So I know a lot of you are probably in California and Spanish is an important language and you probably deal with multilingual but of course Drupal is used around the world and there's so many languages and so many communities where people are speaking other languages and there's actually a need to market Drupal in those languages. So a lot of people have come forward to contribute translations of all these things like press releases and pitch decks and whatnot. But there's a lot of challenges around all of these things and I think the biggest challenge with the promote Drupal initiative for me is that there's kind of this roadmap that we've used in Drupal to get so many people involved in contributing to code but when you're trying to contribute to other things it's a different model, right? So when you're adding content or when you're doing design there's not like a Git system where we can like merge in people's contributions and changes and then track it with these commits. So how do we handle content contribution at this scale and how do we actually make sure that marketers and writers and designers who wanna be involved how do we get everybody coordinated and bring everybody together? So it's a question that we're still trying to figure out and just trying to iteratively improve but we definitely need help in this area and I think we also need help because it's such an ambitious goal. So when you look at Drupal as an open source project versus something huge like Adobe and how they do marketing there's a big difference in budgets and scale and just how the effort gets put into marketing and so coming up with an idea of how to coordinate that I would love to hear your thoughts. So there's some links here to help you if you wanna get involved or wanna see more of this evidence of what's been done so there is a promote Drupal page you can also join us on the Slack channel on Drupal on the Drupal Slack. There's the link to the video in the brand book so you can check that out and see what's already there. And besides all this promote Drupal I also wanna encourage you all to keep growing Drupal in your own way because I know that as much as we wanna have this consolidated effort to promote Drupal really a lot of this over the years has just happened organically through agencies and individuals who go out there every day and they're passionate about Drupal and they share that and that is how we've come so far as a community. So let's keep growing, let's keep doing that and let's also pitch in and promote Drupal together. So I'm gonna stop sharing maybe or no I'll just go back here and answer questions if there are any. Sean had a question in chat. He asks the old familiar Drupalcon is not mentioned at all in the brand book is using that caricature no longer recommended at all. For example, should all Drupal camps redesign their logo? The Drupal, the Drupalcon. Yeah, I think that the Drupalcon is great. I think I had something about it in a previous version of these slides. The Drupalcon is more like an open source logo or not exactly a logo because we can play with it and do what we want with it. I didn't wear my bad camp shirt but I love my bad camp shirt with my little Drupalcon on it and I think that this shows a lot of community spirit and I don't think that we should get rid of it but I do think that when we're trying to tell a story outside of the Drupal community that little Drupalcon, you know, people look at it and they think, oh, what is this? And they maybe don't take Drupal seriously. So I think there's a lot of value in having the new brand which is more of a kind of like a product brand that you can look at alongside WordPress or any other CMS and you think, oh yeah, that's just one of the other CMS logos. It's not this anomaly. And to also mention at the same time, a lot of you probably noticed that Drupal has a logo now which is like a consistent logo along with the Drupal wordmark and that was developed by 611 and it came out of the Drupalcon logo that has all the hexagon and all the triangles, the different colored triangles. So that was kind of adopted and is now kind of the official Drupal logo. From Andre, are there any head-to-head comparisons with other CMSs in the table form or in the table form? Yeah, that's a good question. I know this has come up a lot of like what kind of comparison should we put, for example, into the Drupal pitch deck? I think there has been some work done to create like a kind of a framework comparing Drupal to the other CMSs, but I haven't seen that come to like a finished state. So I think that would also be really valuable. And Bob mentioned that he still hasn't found a link to the actual Drupal marketing calendar. Is there such a thing? No, so that is a project like in the works. So the only thing I have a link to is like the issue to build this calendar. And there is like a draft of it, but it's not, I think the most important thing behind a marketing calendar is that there's probably, there probably needs to be like a meeting every month to update it and add new things and say, okay, what's the status and who's translating this or who's promoting that and who's adding it to these social media channels? So that doesn't exist yet. Another one from Andre, what is your sense for the top three reasons teams eventually don't pick Drupal? That's a great question. I think up until now, probably number one has been the upgrade issue. Like when we ask clients like what's the pain point or what's the reason to not continue with Drupal like the upgrade process has been really a huge pain point. So I think that that is really great that we're coming to like a new system where we don't have that pain point anymore. Although we still have to get through Drupal seven to eight or nine upgrades, which will be the challenge to go through now. That's number one. I think that then very related like updates, security updates for some organizations having to have a team to run security updates using composer, code, like this is a big challenge. So again, having updates, automatic updates in core will go a long way. And then I think we, well, for many years people talked about the Drupal learning curve. And now I think about this as just like the Drupal content editor experience or beginner experience. So when you're first trying Drupal like how hard is it to understand or how hard is it to learn how to do simple things in Drupal. And once you get into Drupal, you really love it but if you're brand new, these little things should be easy. And so part of the work around that has been looking more at the content editor experience and the admin experience. So two projects underway to fix that are the new Claro admin theme. I don't know if everybody's tried that but that just basically refreshes the admin UI and makes it much more friendly, more accessible. And then the new front-end theme. So when you first install Drupal you have something a little bit more inspiring to look at as you build it. The Olivero theme I think helps a lot with that. But there's also been, you know, I've done a bit of UX research in the last couple years comparing Drupal to other CMSs and looking at the content editor experience. And I think delving more into those issues will also help but there's just so many little things to tackle there. It's a, there's always more work to do.