 Alright, well good afternoon everybody, thanks for coming to this particular lightning talk. My name is Marcus Dewon, I'm a solutions engineer with AQUIA and this presentation is about the importance and path to growing the Drupal community through marketeers. So the quick first, who here, quick show of hands to see how we're comprised here, who would identify themselves as a Drupal developer? Okay, alright, how about a Drupal project manager or a product owner, that pretty much rounds the room out, anybody, anyone identify as a marketer working on Drupal? Alright, we got one, maybe two is kind of half hand there, alright, so I don't think there's any big surprise there at that composition, so I want to talk a little bit about that but we'll start with some of my experiences at pre, is in pre sales at AQUIA and so we're always pitching AQUIA products, but I'd say about 75, 80% of the time that we're talking to a new prospect, a new customer prospect, we're also pitching Drupal, so we're talking about Drupal a lot and we've got a really great talk track around Drupal, everyone does it, it's an amazing product, we've got feature, functionality, parity or superiority to most other CMS vendors that are out there, and so what we're often finding ourselves is we're also competing on the fact that this is an open source technology and this is a great story that we do like to tell with open community, there's over a million Drupalists around the world, there's thousands of people that contribute to the product roadmap for Drupal on an annual basis and compare that to some of these other CMS vendors and you may be looking at a couple of dozen, possibly, so there's also a large partner network of incredibly experienced partners with amazing success stories about how our customers have won with Drupal, so it's something that we've gotten quite good at telling those stories and this usually wins the IT team and technical procurement teams as well, they really just kind of get it, but something we often hear is that the marketing team prefers another technology and so I want to dig into this a little bit more because this is kind of a crux, so looking at the Martek landscape, not that long ago, 2011, 13 years ago sounds like a long time but it kind of doesn't seem like it, this was the Martek landscape, lots of vendors, lots of providers up here and so what we're seeing is more and more requirement for marketing leaders to be involved in these technology purchases, these technology decisions, so fast forward to 2023 and this is what that same slide looks like, just an absolute explosion of vendors and services and the types of things that they're offering to our customers and so it's easy to see how this explosion in marketing Martek solutions means that there's many more marketing decision makers involved in the process and what that really means is that there's going to be more requirements around marketing and that changes the entire waiting sometimes of the technology procurement decisions, meaning that so maybe traditional IT requirements will have less waiting in favor of exchange, in favor of some of the marketing requirements around user experience and easy to use interfaces and so this is changing the way that organizations look at technology purchases in favor or maybe away from where we would traditionally have requirements around the ability for a technical solution to be able to handle the complexity of a changing business over time, so just kind of keeping this in context, I'll change pace a little bit and turn to function over form and this is something for me I've personally, it's been a bit of a personal ethos for me, I live my life as function over form, I've said it so many times, I don't need it to be pretty, I just need it to work, this is often to the chagrin of my partner who then has to bring in the form to my life and make things pretty and show me why that's important and she does a great job of that, luckily, but I realized that actually I've had the quote wrong this whole time and so looking into this, the quotes actually form follows function and Lewis Sullivan said this, I'll explain why he's important in a minute but what he meant there is you know get it to function, get it to work first and then make it pretty, so Lewis Sullivan is considered the father of the modern skyscraper, what that means is he was the first architect to be able to put together the new construction materials and processes along with his architectural design in order to be able to build safely build the largest and tallest buildings that we'd ever been able to do and keep up, I guess and I love this comparison, this analogy with Drupal because Drupal really is complex, incredibly varied solution that's able to handle enterprise level requirements from many different types, many different angles and so I think this Drupal as a skyscraper kind of works for me even more whenever I think about the fact that one out of eight enterprises, enterprise sites are also using Drupal and also the fact that this was done safely, some of the things that Drupal does the best, handle the enterprise requirements complex changing requirements and does so safely. One more reason that Lewis Sullivan is important is actually because of his understudy and his understudy was a much more renowned and well-known architect by the name of Frank Lloyd Wright. Now Frank Lloyd Wright actually took his mentor's quote and changed it up a little bit, he said, well it shouldn't be form follows function, form and function should be one, they should be joined and I think he helped in the evolution of architecture and so I love the comparison of bringing Drupal as a skyscraper and to this time of evolution where the needs of the technology market are changing, we've seen that in the Martek landscape and we're ready, we're seeing this need of need for Drupal and what Drupal brings to organizations needs to evolve as well and in this context I'm saying form but I'm really referring to form in the context of the user experience, the interfaces and making Drupal more appealing to a wider community. That's really the point here. So why are marketers important for the growth of Drupal? Well first off there's around 1.3 plus million of the struples, there's tens of millions of marketers so bringing more of those marketers in it's not just to swell our ranks it's also to bring in the incredible wealth of perspectives and fresh ideas and new techniques that are going to help us in this evolution. We're also in this process attracting more global leaders, more Fortune 100, Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 companies to Drupal increase our use cases and great success stories that we have while also bringing more funding to our partner agencies bringing more money into the entire Drupal community. So that's why they're so important but how do we get more marketers interested in Drupal and choosing Drupal ideally? Well there's a few ways. So one here is this is something analyst reviews Gartner and Forrester for those of you who don't know put analyst reviews out every year on different types of products. Aquia invests heavily in time and financially in order to ensure that we stay in that top right hand corner that leaders quadrant because what this does it actually brings us into deals it brings us into RFP conversations for customers that never would have heard about Aquia or Drupal otherwise. So this is one important way that we're being able to extol the virtues and seeing the praises of Drupal and what Drupal does to people who might not have ever heard it previously. So recommend you check these reports out if you haven't seen them. Another way is the Drupal marketing committee. Now the Drupal marketing committee was launched last year. This is a committee of Drupal marketing executives and global marketing leaders that through this committee is solely focused on bringing awareness to Drupal increasing the ways that people outside of our Drupal community learn find out about Drupal. And the third one is Drupal Promote. Now Drupal Promote is accessible to all of us here we've got it's on Drupal.org you see the website here there's a lot of great information on Drupal Drupal Promote for Drupal pitch deck for those of you that need to pitch it brand book case studies use cases about the amazing customers that are using Drupal. And additionally what I love the most about this is the non-code contribution opportunities. So a place for everybody to be able to go and if you want to contribute to Drupal but you don't maybe have the skills to be a coder or don't want to update documentation there's other volunteer opportunities to be able to contribute to the Drupal project. So a couple things that we've identified from customers and prospects over time is this perception versus a need concept. What's interesting about listening to Dries over the past week that we've had the chance to speak with him is he's kind of hit on everything that we've got over the next couple of slides as perceptions. So I've been thinking about this is actually not just perception versus need but also a bit of objection versus rebuttal because we need to be able to promote Drupal to those outside of our community and this is one way that we can do that. So being prepared with some of these so more of the perceptions that Drupal is hard to use and oftentimes we'll hear this around the page layout builder certain interface experiences within Drupal we'll hear this so need to make Drupal easier well this is not new information right there's obviously a gap in the market because we've got a lot of people working on this exact type of issue open-source projects contributed modules some proprietary companies AQUI is up there but no one solved it yet right there's no been no secret sauce for how to get the proper page building experience in Drupal that feels seamless to to everyone it works. So we've got some very specific Drupal core function and focus that's going into that so we know there's work being done there. Another perception Drupal's learning curve is too steep I don't think that many people in this room would agree would disagree with me that it takes some time to get into Drupal and become proficient with it so that's the perception is there is the need access to more Drupal training there's lots of Drupal training out there already Drupalize me the certification courses there's paid programs we've got some some great partners that are doing lots of training for Drupal but one of the things that we've been talking about that was announced in the keynote is Drupal recipes is something coming now helping to get Drupal sites off the ground more quickly allows us to then have new types of Drupal training opportunities specifically meaning you might be able to compress into a semester type of course for a university or a vocational school the ability to start and start a Drupal course and by the end of the semester actually have something that you can produce you can put out the goal here being being able to bring in more youth bring in younger people into the community because we're growing the community that's the idea and the last one here is that Drupal is hard to maintain this is something that we hear a lot in our conversations but more often it's because of this fear around open source that open source is not secure well one of the reasons that we're hearing from customers that Drupal is hard to maintain is because there's a lot of updates to make sure that it is secure and we know that's not going to be a problem for long because of the automatic updates that are coming so in a upcoming version of Drupal we're going to have automatic updates I'm sure most of you've heard that now because it was announced earlier on the keynote something that wasn't said I think is that this will be the most secure automatic update feature for any CMS available and that's straight from Dries so a quick recap there are a lot of marketers so many people out there who can help us be a better community help us in this evolution many reasons to want them in our community we just need to let them know who we are and that we can help them and that's something for all of us to do coming back to the forum and function conversation the Drupal functionality what we've built in that skyscraper is second to none the ability for it to handle these complex and varied use cases is amazing but we've spent a lot of time on that and maybe not as much time and focus on the form area of things and we need to do that if we want to bring these marketing masses and continue to attract the younger generations things don't have to be beautiful but it helps when they look easy and it's and it's even better when they're very easy to at least start so the challenge we all need to be thinking we all need to be thinking about how it can make Drupal easier to use how it can make it more attractive how it can make Drupal more configurable because we lose people when they have to step out of the browser in that paid building or that site building experience and we should all be thinking about how to better position Drupal with people outside of our community we all have a voice we can all contribute so my one ask here my one ask is if you are designing a project you're building a project or a contribution right now before you're done with that design before you are ready to commit that code please have a marketing colleague or a mentor take a look at this with the UX perspective with a user experience perspective perspective to help inform that because there might be some small change that can be made in order to keep us heading down the path that we need to attract the right kinds of growth that we want in our evolution so and if you find if you have problems finding those types of people the Drupal promote also has a Slack channel it's not just their website so in conclusion I'm incredibly proud to be part of the Drupal community and the Drupal project I think it's an amazing initiative and movement but I do think we have a changing technological landscape and that requires continued evolution we've seen that Drupal can evolve but I think that this continued evolution is going to involve more of the community evolving as well the keynote said thinking of the needs of strangers or people that you haven't met yet really helped move trees and I think just a slight change of that is consider the requirements of the community members that we just haven't met yet thank you all