 Let's go ahead and get moving. Willum's propped open with a trash can. Yeah, let's do it. OK, yes, now we're starting. The doors are shut. You're all locked in here with me. So welcome to my session. Spotlight on the featured showcase, writing great case studies for Drupal.org. It is the first of the Drupal.org track. If I could get my slides working, that would be nice. Yes, Drupal.org track. So let's jump right in. Today, we will learn I'm a big roadmap person. I don't know about you. So here's your outline of what we're going to learn about today. First, we're going to learn who am I, followed by some definitions of what our case studies on Drupal.org, why they're important, what the featured showcase is. Basically, this is the session description copied over and pasted onto this slide. So you all know what you're in for. So who am I? My name is Lee Carver. My Drupal.org username is Lee C. I've been at the Drupal Association since early 2014. I've been in Drupal since August of 2012. So been around for a little while, but I'm not terribly technical. I'm a highly caffeinated content writer. I'm highly caffeinated right now. If I talk too quickly, just say something. I was also trained in the using of Drupal by Tatiana right here in the lovely sweater. And I'm her number one fan. We have a fan club. They're T-shirts. If you want a T-shirt, let me know. At the Drupal Association, one of the components of my job is moderating the issue queue for the featured case study requests. I also write community spotlights. And I work a lot on the Drupal cons as well, but we're not going to focus on that. Since I'm a writer, I figured that we would start the session with some definitions. And I went to the dictionary, which is my favorite book. What is the definition of a case study? Well, a case study, according to the dictionary, is a process or record of research in which detailed consideration is given to the development of a particular person, group, or situation over a period of time, a particular instance of something used or analyzed in order to illustrate a thesis or principle. Really opaque stuff. So I changed it. It is a record of research in which detailed consideration is given to the development of a Drupal website over a period of time. And it is a particular instance of something used in order to illustrate the value of the Drupal CMS. And just so that we're all on the same page, when we're talking about case studies in this section, we're talking specifically about the case studies found on drupal.org slash case studies. They all follow the same format of site name, screenshot, URL, why Drupal was chosen, described project. These are all fields that you fill in when you go on drupal.org to create a case study. So we all good? Definitions? Yes. We're gonna come back to those later. So what is the value of case studies? I believe and I have seen that case studies, having a drupal.org case study is good for your company and it's good for the greater Drupal ecosystem. It creates understandable content for people who aren't necessarily technical. And it actually, because of that, it's a really critical tool in our marketing toolbox for showing the value of the Drupal CMS. It shows off how powerful it is, how versatile it is, how secure it is and stable. Hello, welcome to the session. It also shows off how flexible Drupal is because we have such a wide variety of case studies. In our featured showcase, we have banks and universities and non-profits and government websites and giant corporate websites. It's all there, it's all in the case study section. They also help organizations showcase what they do best, which is, again, good for you, good for Drupal, because you get your bragging rights, you get show off, hey, look at this really cool thing that we built, it's super cool. It shows your team's abilities. It shows how amazing the Drupal software is and how good you are with it. And it shows that the websites that you build with Drupal are valuable and they work for your clients. Lastly, we've actually had people say, yeah, our case studies help us get noticed. Some of our partners downstairs on the trade show floor say that a lot of their business comes from the Drupal.org, much showcase, marketplace. And case studies are visible on the marketplace as well. So again, this is really great for your companies. They also point back to your site from the front page of Drupal.org as soon as they get pushed to the featured section, which, for those of you who are familiar with SEO, that's really, really great link juice. You also get to tap the Drupal community and me for no charge for our expertise on marketing and composition, so it's editorial assistance free of charge. And lastly, you get a formal association on Drupal.org between the website that you built and your organization. So you'll always have that list of, say, we helped build Amnesty International or we built the Greenpeace site or we built the Beatles website. And that's really cool too. Lastly, case studies help Drupal get noticed. We went over this a little bit, but there's all sorts of these things. These are all examples pulled from the featured showcase. They show how Drupal is flexible and scalable and secure and super customizable and everybody uses it if they're big or they're little and the sites are really pretty. Drupal is a content repository. I could go on. So, case studies are great. They're good for you, they're good for Drupal. You gotta love them, it's super exciting. So, the featured showcase. I've been talking about this a lot and you may be going, I think I know what that is, but I'm not really sure. When you go to Drupal.org and you scroll to the bottom, you see this little section that says who uses Drupal and then there's three sites. If you click on the who uses Drupal button, it takes you to the featured showcase. It is actually the first thing, the featured showcase is the first thing that people see when they go looking for case studies because you have to click over to the next tab to get to the community showcase. It is a collection of the most innovative and beautiful Drupal websites and again, it showcases Drupal as a solution. So, the featured showcase is where all the cool kids hang out on Drupal.org and it's actually not all that difficult to get your case study into the featured showcase. It's just a time consuming process and here's what that process looks like. So, step one, somebody writes a case study and puts it on Drupal.org. Again, this is Drupal.org slash case studies and you fill out the form and the more thorough that you are with filling out the web form and the more grammatically correct your content is, the happier I am. We also ask that you include lots of pictures because as you've probably noticed, it's really hard to read a wall of text. And when you create these case studies on Drupal.org, they default straight into the community showcase. The next step is that you file an issue in the issue queue. It's in the content issue queue, content type case studies. There's a link at the end of this session. And when you create that issue, you need to include the name of your case study, include a link to the case study, tell us why you think it's worthy of promotion. And if you mark the issue as needs review, straight out of the gate, we'll get to it quicker because needs review is a flag for me and Dave Hochhausen, who is the other person who is really active in the case studies queue. And I cannot tell you how many emails I get that are like, please promote case study, case study name to the featured section, which is really frustrating because the issue name doesn't include the name of the case study. So please make sure that you actually follow the directions when you file the issue. The next step is that the back and forth begins. These are all closed fixed case studies that have been promoted to the featured section. As you can see, sometimes there's a lot of back and forth and begging and pleading to fix things and it's a process. So in this back and forth, this is where I provide feedback, Dave provides feedback, and other members of the community occasionally chime in as well. Usually I start off with, this is a really good start, now fix it. We read every case study very thoroughly multiple times, so all of the feedback that we give you is gonna be really thoughtful and really coming from a genuine place of caring and wanting to help you make that content the best. We're not trying to be mean. We really want this featured showcase to be amazing and we want your case study to be amazing too. So some of the common problems that we come across when Dave and I are going back and forth with people about editing their case studies, also known as how to take a case study from good to great. Number one problem, bad grammar. Like I'm always so surprised. It's like grammar, it's grammar. It's how English is put together and in the case of companies that are non-native English, like that's fine, totally understand it, but for people who I assume graduated from high school, it can be really upsetting when I see a case study and they didn't even bother to proofread for grammar, so please proofread, run a spell check, get somebody to look it over, especially if that somebody is either fluent in English or a really good writer, that's even better. So number one problem, grammar. Another problem that we very frequently come across is that case studies are way too promotional of your company, that they're going on and on and on about your team's bespoke solutions and all of these wonderful things that only you can do. And that's fantastic, but that's not what we're looking for. These case studies are meant to showcase Drupal as a solution, not your company. And so again, this comes back to what we talk about when we talk about drupal.org case studies. This is not necessarily a marketing tool for you to use on your website. This is a marketing tool for Drupal. So you did really good work, but please focus on promoting Drupal, not your company. And you can't promote your company, we're gonna talk about that in a little bit, but focus on Drupal. Another problem that we frequently come across is that there just is not enough content that people go through and they fill in maybe two or three sentences per field in the case study submission form and that's just not gonna cut it. We want to know how you built what you build. Grammar's hard. We want to know how you made this amazing site. Why is it amazing? Convince us, this is supposed to be your place to shine. So if you did something really clever, if you built something really amazing, talk about it. Describe it in disgusting detail. It is easier to take things out than to put them in. Again, this comes back to this is, these case studies are about Drupal. And I have actually seen case studies go up for promotion to featured that mentioned Drupal maybe wants. That's not what the feature showcases for. We want to know about Drupal. We want to know what you did with Drupal. What did you do? How did you do it? Why did you use Drupal to do it? Tell us again in very great detail why you went with Drupal. Now this one is much trickier. Focusing on what matters can be really difficult and this is something that I take very seriously and that I will help you find. There is always, in every single case study, even if it is, we built a three page site. There's always something in there that's really interesting. There's some sort of solution that's fascinating, a problem that you solved that maybe you solved in a really clever or elegant way. And that's what matters. We don't want to hear every single last little thing that you did. We want to know about the one amazing or the three amazing things that you did. So, when you are writing your case study, please pick one or two things that you feel that you did well and then tell us about them. Find what's most important and write to that. So, back to the submission process. Everybody does some writing. Lots and lots of writing. And then there's some issue cue ping pong and that's me and Dave on the one side and maybe you on the other and then the issue in the middle is going from needs reviewed and needs worked needs reviewed and needs worked. It's super fun. Everybody loves it. So, once we've done all of our feedback and our back and forth and everybody's happy, the case study needs to accumulate a plus one from the community, again, generally Dave and a plus one from the Drupal Association which is almost always me but occasionally Tatiana. Once it has that, it can be promoted and this is just, again, it's a check to make sure that the right case studies are getting promoted in the right way, that the content really is the best that it can be. So, and then you get this really exciting message. Yay, you're on the front page of Drupal.org, how exciting. And then the case study gets marked to fix and we're happy. And everybody has a dance party. So, if you need some inspiration while you're working on your case studies or you're thinking about writing your case studies but maybe you don't know what to do, check out some of these recommended examples. Most of these were promoted fairly recently within the past year or so and they do, I mean, again, they showcase that there's a huge range of case studies on Drupal.org showing all of the amazing things that Drupal can do. So, our case studies really don't all fit into a certain type or certain box. We want to know about everything. And that's just a pretty picture of all the case studies, I love them. So, next step, writing beyond the guidelines or how to make life easier for everybody. So, the guidelines live at Drupal.org slash case studies slash guidelines. I know that's really difficult to remember but that's where you'll find them. And this is just a copied version of the guidelines. They're not very long, they're not very difficult. If you write to the guidelines, it'll be amazing. So, we're gonna break it down a little bit. You can come in, I'm always scaring them away. So, step one, describe the organizational or client goals the project met or exceeded. So, here is where you need to be specific. Set the scene, tell us what was wrong? What needed fixing? What were the pain points? Why did the client need a new site? Who was going to use it? Who was the audience that was going to visit this site? How was the audience going to use the site or how was the client going to use the site? So, when I look at these case studies, in this section, people reading it should be able to recognize themselves. Either if they're an agency looking for inspiration, they should be able to recognize themselves building sites for their clients or if they're a Drupal evaluator, they should be able to say, oh, you know what, we have that problem. This is something that we struggle with. I need to read this case study. This is gonna tell me how to fix the thing. So, describe. Next, explain your approach. Describe why you chose Drupal instead of other options. That may include why the modules you chose were the best fit for your project, why you used a custom theme, and so on. So, did you do any user research? Maybe, maybe not. If so, why, if not, why not? Again, were there specific pain points that Drupal itself addressed? For example, maybe Drupal out of the box had this one thing that you really needed and you knew it would save you a lot of time to use it, so you did. Tell us about Drupal as a solution. I so often see in this process people say, well, we went with Drupal because we already knew how to use it and we work in Drupal and that was why. That's not good enough, guys. We wanna know why Drupal was a good fit for this site. Why did you take this client? And you might have to be a little bit of creative with your answer, but tell us about Drupal as a solution. Write about the project's timeline and milestones. Now, this guideline is a little bit more negotiable, but this is something that we do really like to see. How did you split up the work? What methodology did you use to split up the work? Did you do Agile, did you do waterfall? Tell us everything. Were there deliverables that you needed immediately or was there something that you knew would take a long time to develop? And if so, how did you make sure that you developed and delivered everything on time? Tell us about your process. Also, share any challenges and how you resolved them. So this is your space to brag about how smart you are. Show off how ingenious your employees are or your developers are or how you personally are just super brilliant and show off the elegance of Drupal as a solution. So if you came up with any clever workarounds or did something really amazing, show off here. This is also the most important part of your case study. So really, tell us about what the challenges were, how you resolved them and be detailed about it and use good grammar. So another very important part of your case study is to include clear technical details, tips and tricks so others can learn from your work. So as it says on the slide, don't tell us what you fixed. Tell us how you fixed the thing. So this is the point in the case study where you'll lose anybody who doesn't have any technical knowledge, but that's okay because again, these are showcasing Drupal as a solution. So inspire other Drupalers, show off how great you are. I'm not asking you to include any proprietary information. That's totally fine. There are sensitive things, but this comes back to what we were saying earlier about how there is always something in every single case study that's fascinating or beautiful or really, really clever. And this is where you show that off. Also, don't just tell us that having this Drupal site was a really good result for the client. Show us, give us data, give us metrics. This may include more traffic, that there were better load times or more conversions, lower bounce rates, whatever. So this is the did it work section. Did what you do work? How well did it work? Why did it work? We already know that. Just give us the results. And this is also like, this can be soft metrics, not just numbers, but our client was really happy. Their content editors had a much easier time using the site, uploading things. It's super pretty and we really like it and everybody's really happy. So show that you did a good job. So if you do all of these things that I have told you to do, you will have produced a process or record of research which detailed consideration is given to the development of a Drupal website over a period of time, or a particular instance of something used or analyzed in order to illustrate the value of the Drupal CMS. Look, we did it. We made it to the dictionary definition again. How exciting. So if you manage to nail the dictionary definition of case study, I will give you a high five and a plus one in the issue queue. And you'll be promoted to the front page and everybody will be super happy and there will be a dance party. So as you can see, it is a long process to get into the featured section. It can take a lot of time. There's a lot of work. So how can you make it easier? How can you make a difference? You can get involved. You're all experts now. You sat through my session. You can be like BB-8 and stick your thumbs up and give things plus once. So everybody in this room has the ability to weigh in and provide feedback. Each of you has specific knowledge that is really helpful and you can provide insight, unique insight that I can't provide. So please consider getting involved in the case study issue queue. Also, when you comment in the queues, you can credit your employer, which makes them look good and then you look good and everybody looks good and everybody's happy. Also, from a community contribution standpoint, the more people that we have weighing in in the issue queues, the quicker authors receive their feedback, which means that then they can turn around and follow the feedback and then mark the issue as needs review and then I can get to it because the more quickly the community weighs in, the quicker I weigh in. Like I said earlier, I work on many things, including DrupalCon and it is easy for me to get completely sidetracked. So if I see that the community is really like pushing on a case study, I'll go and check it out. And also, if you don't have lots of technical knowledge, this is a really, really good way to get involved and to make contributions because I am not a developer, I think I know what a block is maybe, but I can read a case study and I can say, okay, I don't know like what these words mean but I'm really interested and I can tell that you did something cool, so tell me more about these words. So if you want to get involved in the case study issue queue, please go to Drupal.org slash project slash issues slash content, you will be able to sort to the case study type. Also, if you think that somebody in the community has been amazing, you can also create an issue in the content queue for community spotlights, which I'll follow up on. And if you want to make your own case study, you can go to Drupal.org slash case studies. And I hope to see you all in the queues. Any questions? How many featured case studies do I publish in a week or a month? Always bump to featured on Monday morning, central time, so that people start off their work week on the front page of Drupal.org. There's some months where I promote one every single week and then there are stretches of time where I don't promote anything. It really depends. I've noticed that the case studies tend to come in like in random floods, like there'll be nothing in the queue for three months and then all of a sudden I get six. So, and then of those six, maybe two will fall off into the abyss of closed won't fix. So it really just depends. And again, this is also an opportunity for the community to get involved and increase the volume of case studies being published. No, it's just an unlimited stack, but they all get pushed down. So the top three, the most three recent case studies to be pushed to featured live on the bottom of the front page of Drupal.org. And then there's also a carousel slider at the top of the featured showcase. And they live there and then as they get bumped down, they just populate the pages. So, and then eventually they get pushed to the second page and there's a period of mourning. Oh no, we love to get sites that were previously built on Drupal and either people had a bad experience and needed to be reconvenced or they really loved Drupal. Like that's a really nice thing to have in your, like why we went with Drupal section you say, well the client already used Drupal and they really loved it. It's like yes, good marketing. So yes, any, as long as it is a Drupal site, because sometimes we do get case studies that people want to promote to featured that are built with like WordPress. It's Drupal.org guys. So, no it's, as long as the site is still running Drupal, you can write a case study on it. We do have a showcase for sites that are Drupal 8. And especially like Drupal 8 early adapters, early adopters, this is not Darwinism. Yeah, if you have an early adopter in your back pocket, definitely write that case study. But yeah, as long as the site is still running Drupal, you are welcome to write about it. More questions? You write very well, I would not hate it at all. I don't hate it when anybody writes case studies, I just get really sad when they don't know how to English. More questions, there's plenty of time. Tatiana wants to ask something. You made eye contact. You have to ask a question. Do I have a favorite case study that I always send people to as an example? No, I have a collection of favorites. So, when I give people example case studies to go look at, it's generally not because I'm really attached to this one case study. Oh, I do have a favorite though. I will point people to examples that I think are relevant to what I see they're trying to do but maybe you're having difficulty executing in terms of demonstrating the value of what they've done. So, but my favorite case study is the Forest Park map. It's currently about halfway down the front page of the featured showcase, it's really cool. I just think that the, like they had this, they built this interactive map with Drupal and you can use it on mobile and you can like walk around this park in St. Louis and interact with the map via your phone and I just, it's a really cool case study, it's a really cool product and reading the case study, even though it was all about the capabilities of Drupal, I was like, I think I might need to go to St. Louis and see this park. So, more questions? Okay, everybody's looking at their phone, so I'm gonna assume no. Yeah, you're a good listener. You win the session, you get a high five. So, thank you all for coming out and listening to me ramble today. I really hope that you learned something useful and I appreciate you all being here. This is my first DrupalCon session, so super exciting. If you have any questions, you can find me in the issue queue, you can find me on Drupal.org, you can tweet at Drupal association and I will get back with you almost immediately. So, thank you. And please evaluate the session so I know how I did. And please be nice. Oh, there's a link, there's a link right there. And I'm gonna make sure that the slides get uploaded to the session page as well. So, you can find them from there.