[Marketing] Re: [Board] Marketing Costs/Budget in 2009

Committees Marketing
1

Chris,

Very good observations. This should be brought to the attention of the marketing committee, from which we are eagerly waiting for a marketing plan with associated costs (i.e., how to spend the money we're expecting to have). (I just did that by cc'ing to the marketing list)

Tyler wrote somewhere that some say "Your Open Source Compass" is lame. "We support the software that supports your geospatial operations" sounds very good although it's a bit long for the logo.

Regards,

Ari

Christopher Schmidt kirjoitti:

To Whom it May Concern,

Recently, I was reviewing the Board's budget discussions for the Budget
in 2009 in the mailing list archives, especially as they relate to
possible expenditures for Marketing in 2009.

I'll admit that I feel slightly confused as to what the goal of the
marketing budget is. From what I'm reading, there is an expectation that
marketing funding would be a significant portion of the spending from
the foundation as a whole, and I'd like to understand how that money is
or might be spent.

Currently, I see evidence that some significant portion of the marketing
budget in previous years was used for "Event support" -- buying booth
space, primarily, or other similar events. Although I see the
importance, in some cases, of attending events, I wonder if there might
not be a more efficient way of marketing OSGeo with funds that may or
may not be available. To me, it's not clear that event support really
has the highest return on investment for OSGeo, even within the
marketing world.

Specifically, I think that one of the areas that OSGeo is doing poorest
in marketing is in simply presenting a unified view targeted towards
potential sponsors. OSGeo -- as a community -- has grown organically in
a way that is both healthy and encouraging. However, OSGeo as a movement
towards a well-known name is not doing particularly well. The key
message/purpose of OSGeo -- "We support the software that supports your
geospatial operations" -- is one that we have not put nearly enought
effort into selling, in my opinion.

One example of an organization which has taken the lead -- especially
recently -- in rebranding itself, is the OpenGeo group (the Geospatial
division of the Open Planning Project). The web presence of OpenGeo --
http://opengeo.org/ -- is in a style that corporations feel immediatley
at home with, and has much more 'gut appeal' to the types of
organizations that OSGeo seems to be seeking as sponsors than the
current OSGeo website does.

This wasn't accomplished by creating a lot of booth materials --
OpenGeo's total booth materials cost for FOSS4G must have been very
minimal compared to even OSGeo's this year.

The current OSGeo website is not a completely inadequate community site.
It has some success in that regard. But OSGeo -- as an entity seeking
sponsorship -- can't only be about building the community. It really
needs to be seen as an organization which is supporting these Open
Source projects to be truly successful.

With that in mind, I would like to propose for your consideration the
following:

  In order to accomplish its goals of supporting the Open Source
  projects that make up OSGeo, OSGeo should take on the task of
  improving their brand by creating a strong web presence targeted
  towards potential sponsors. Specifically, this web presence should be
  seeking to identify other organizations with similar potential
  targets, and mimic the successes of those organizations in
  presentation of materials.

  The materials being presented should include:
    * A high level overview of OSGeo and what it is
    * A high level overview of the projects that are currently supported
      by OSGeo, targeted towards executive -- rather than
      developer-oriented -- summary
    * A high level overview of how OSGeo achieves its goals in
      supporting these projects
    * How organizations can help support OSGeo in the above task.

  This web presence should exist in *addition* to the resources which
  are currently used by the community.

It's not clear to me if this effort should be pursued within the
existing marketing community in OSGeo, or pursued by some other group
already existing within OSGeo. It is clear to me that there has not been
a lot of thought put into the current website from the perspective of
someone with experience in marketing. This isn't a bad thing,
neccesarily, but I think in order for OSGeo to continue to grow, this is
going to become more and more of a problem.

Clearly, this is not the sole marketing task for OSGeo: materials to be
used at conferences should continue to be pursued. However, I think to
some extent, OSGeo needs to help projects which help themselves beyond a
certain point. OSgeo's job is to act as the starting point for people to
get *to* the information they need about a project -- not a place to
provide that information. Right now, probably due in part to the level
of participation by the projects themselves in the OSGeo community,
there is a blurry line here, and I think that's one of the things that
should be changed.

It's not entirely clear to me whether the OSGeo drupal website that
currently exists is important to the community. It's possible it is, and
that it could continue to exist in some form. However, I think that it
is not sufficient as an executive overview of what OSGeo is, what it
does, and what each of its proejcts does from the marketing perspective.
It is clear to me that some projects are better at internal marketing
that others -- OSGeo should take the first step for each of these
projects within its own realm, and encourage projects to do their own
work outside of that.

We've built a great community. The explosion of local chapters is
evidence of that. The desire to become an OSGeo project from projects
currently not in incubation is also evidence of that. In order to
continue to grow and succeed in supporting our projects, I think it's
really time to seriously look at how to market OSGeo as an organization
to executives with checkbooks, and I think an improved web presence is a
key part of that task.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best Regards,
  
--
Prof. Ari Jolma
Environmental Management Information Technology
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
tel: +358 9 4511 address: POBox 5300, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://geoinformatics.tkk.fi

2

On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 06:38:12PM +0200, Ari Jolma wrote:

Chris,

Very good observations. This should be brought to the attention of the
marketing committee, from which we are eagerly waiting for a marketing
plan with associated costs (i.e., how to spend the money we're expecting
to have). (I just did that by cc'ing to the marketing list)

Tyler wrote somewhere that some say "Your Open Source Compass" is lame.
"We support the software that supports your geospatial operations"
sounds very good although it's a bit long for the logo.

I don't mind "Your Open Source Compass" as a short slogan. Specifically,
I think OSGeo's primary purpose as an organization is to help direct
people to the projects that they should be using (under the OSGeo
umbrella, primarily, but also other related projects). The facelift that
I've mentioned here is targeted towards exactly that: a web presence
that lets people know about OSGeo, and helps them find the proects they
should be using.

Taking people who are lost, and directing them, is a fine task to use a
compass for. OSGeo should be that compass.

That said, OSGeo's current positioning is not particularly well-suited
towards this task, so there is a clear lack here that could be *why* the
"Open Source Compass" slogan doesn't really fit well. It seems to me
that fitting the Open Source Compass slogan better is an ideal task to
attempt to achieve.

Regards,

Ari

Christopher Schmidt kirjoitti:
>To Whom it May Concern,
>
>Recently, I was reviewing the Board's budget discussions for the Budget
>in 2009 in the mailing list archives, especially as they relate to
>possible expenditures for Marketing in 2009.
>
>I'll admit that I feel slightly confused as to what the goal of the
>marketing budget is. From what I'm reading, there is an expectation that
>marketing funding would be a significant portion of the spending from
>the foundation as a whole, and I'd like to understand how that money is
>or might be spent.
>
>Currently, I see evidence that some significant portion of the marketing
>budget in previous years was used for "Event support" -- buying booth
>space, primarily, or other similar events. Although I see the
>importance, in some cases, of attending events, I wonder if there might
>not be a more efficient way of marketing OSGeo with funds that may or
>may not be available. To me, it's not clear that event support really
>has the highest return on investment for OSGeo, even within the
>marketing world.
>
>Specifically, I think that one of the areas that OSGeo is doing poorest
>in marketing is in simply presenting a unified view targeted towards
>potential sponsors. OSGeo -- as a community -- has grown organically in
>a way that is both healthy and encouraging. However, OSGeo as a movement
>towards a well-known name is not doing particularly well. The key
>message/purpose of OSGeo -- "We support the software that supports your
>geospatial operations" -- is one that we have not put nearly enought
>effort into selling, in my opinion.
>
>One example of an organization which has taken the lead -- especially
>recently -- in rebranding itself, is the OpenGeo group (the Geospatial
>division of the Open Planning Project). The web presence of OpenGeo --
>http://opengeo.org/ -- is in a style that corporations feel immediatley
>at home with, and has much more 'gut appeal' to the types of
>organizations that OSGeo seems to be seeking as sponsors than the
>current OSGeo website does.
>
>This wasn't accomplished by creating a lot of booth materials --
>OpenGeo's total booth materials cost for FOSS4G must have been very
>minimal compared to even OSGeo's this year.
>
>The current OSGeo website is not a completely inadequate community site.
>It has some success in that regard. But OSGeo -- as an entity seeking
>sponsorship -- can't only be about building the community. It really
>needs to be seen as an organization which is supporting these Open
>Source projects to be truly successful.
>
>With that in mind, I would like to propose for your consideration the
>following:
>
> In order to accomplish its goals of supporting the Open Source
> projects that make up OSGeo, OSGeo should take on the task of
> improving their brand by creating a strong web presence targeted
> towards potential sponsors. Specifically, this web presence should be
> seeking to identify other organizations with similar potential
> targets, and mimic the successes of those organizations in
> presentation of materials.
>
> The materials being presented should include:
> * A high level overview of OSGeo and what it is
> * A high level overview of the projects that are currently supported
> by OSGeo, targeted towards executive -- rather than
> developer-oriented -- summary
> * A high level overview of how OSGeo achieves its goals in
> supporting these projects
> * How organizations can help support OSGeo in the above task.
>
> This web presence should exist in *addition* to the resources which
> are currently used by the community.
>
>It's not clear to me if this effort should be pursued within the
>existing marketing community in OSGeo, or pursued by some other group
>already existing within OSGeo. It is clear to me that there has not been
>a lot of thought put into the current website from the perspective of
>someone with experience in marketing. This isn't a bad thing,
>neccesarily, but I think in order for OSGeo to continue to grow, this is
>going to become more and more of a problem.
>
>Clearly, this is not the sole marketing task for OSGeo: materials to be
>used at conferences should continue to be pursued. However, I think to
>some extent, OSGeo needs to help projects which help themselves beyond a
>certain point. OSgeo's job is to act as the starting point for people to
>get *to* the information they need about a project -- not a place to
>provide that information. Right now, probably due in part to the level
>of participation by the projects themselves in the OSGeo community,
>there is a blurry line here, and I think that's one of the things that
>should be changed.
>
>It's not entirely clear to me whether the OSGeo drupal website that
>currently exists is important to the community. It's possible it is, and
>that it could continue to exist in some form. However, I think that it
>is not sufficient as an executive overview of what OSGeo is, what it
>does, and what each of its proejcts does from the marketing perspective.
>It is clear to me that some projects are better at internal marketing
>that others -- OSGeo should take the first step for each of these
>projects within its own realm, and encourage projects to do their own
>work outside of that.
>
>We've built a great community. The explosion of local chapters is
>evidence of that. The desire to become an OSGeo project from projects
>currently not in incubation is also evidence of that. In order to
>continue to grow and succeed in supporting our projects, I think it's
>really time to seriously look at how to market OSGeo as an organization
>to executives with checkbooks, and I think an improved web presence is a
>key part of that task.
>
>Thank you for your consideration.
>
>Best Regards,
>

--
Prof. Ari Jolma
Environmental Management Information Technology
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
tel: +358 9 4511 address: POBox 5300, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://geoinformatics.tkk.fi

--
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta

3

Ari,
I think you have made an accurate assessment of OSGeo's need to re-target our front-door web pages to be more commercially focused.

I'm also encouraged to see someone challenging the comparative value of different marketing activities.

The difficult part which I'm interested to hear your thoughts on are:
* How are we going to resource a web page cleanup?
* What will it cost? (So we can budget for it, and compare ROI from web pages vs presence at conferences)
* Are there any metrics we can call upon which compare effectiveness of web marketing vs conference marketing?

Christopher Schmidt wrote:

On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 06:38:12PM +0200, Ari Jolma wrote:
  

Chris,

Very good observations. This should be brought to the attention of the marketing committee, from which we are eagerly waiting for a marketing plan with associated costs (i.e., how to spend the money we're expecting to have). (I just did that by cc'ing to the marketing list)

Tyler wrote somewhere that some say "Your Open Source Compass" is lame. "We support the software that supports your geospatial operations" sounds very good although it's a bit long for the logo.
    
I don't mind "Your Open Source Compass" as a short slogan. Specifically,
I think OSGeo's primary purpose as an organization is to help direct
people to the projects that they should be using (under the OSGeo
umbrella, primarily, but also other related projects). The facelift that
I've mentioned here is targeted towards exactly that: a web presence
that lets people know about OSGeo, and helps them find the proects they
should be using.

Taking people who are lost, and directing them, is a fine task to use a
compass for. OSGeo should be that compass.

That said, OSGeo's current positioning is not particularly well-suited
towards this task, so there is a clear lack here that could be *why* the
"Open Source Compass" slogan doesn't really fit well. It seems to me
that fitting the Open Source Compass slogan better is an ideal task to
attempt to achieve.

Regards,

Ari

Christopher Schmidt kirjoitti:
    

To Whom it May Concern,

Recently, I was reviewing the Board's budget discussions for the Budget
in 2009 in the mailing list archives, especially as they relate to
possible expenditures for Marketing in 2009.

I'll admit that I feel slightly confused as to what the goal of the
marketing budget is. From what I'm reading, there is an expectation that
marketing funding would be a significant portion of the spending from
the foundation as a whole, and I'd like to understand how that money is
or might be spent.

Currently, I see evidence that some significant portion of the marketing
budget in previous years was used for "Event support" -- buying booth
space, primarily, or other similar events. Although I see the
importance, in some cases, of attending events, I wonder if there might
not be a more efficient way of marketing OSGeo with funds that may or
may not be available. To me, it's not clear that event support really
has the highest return on investment for OSGeo, even within the
marketing world.

Specifically, I think that one of the areas that OSGeo is doing poorest
in marketing is in simply presenting a unified view targeted towards
potential sponsors. OSGeo -- as a community -- has grown organically in
a way that is both healthy and encouraging. However, OSGeo as a movement
towards a well-known name is not doing particularly well. The key
message/purpose of OSGeo -- "We support the software that supports your
geospatial operations" -- is one that we have not put nearly enought
effort into selling, in my opinion.

One example of an organization which has taken the lead -- especially
recently -- in rebranding itself, is the OpenGeo group (the Geospatial
division of the Open Planning Project). The web presence of OpenGeo --
http://opengeo.org/ -- is in a style that corporations feel immediatley
at home with, and has much more 'gut appeal' to the types of
organizations that OSGeo seems to be seeking as sponsors than the
current OSGeo website does.

This wasn't accomplished by creating a lot of booth materials --
OpenGeo's total booth materials cost for FOSS4G must have been very
minimal compared to even OSGeo's this year.

The current OSGeo website is not a completely inadequate community site.
It has some success in that regard. But OSGeo -- as an entity seeking
sponsorship -- can't only be about building the community. It really
needs to be seen as an organization which is supporting these Open
Source projects to be truly successful.

With that in mind, I would like to propose for your consideration the
following:

In order to accomplish its goals of supporting the Open Source
projects that make up OSGeo, OSGeo should take on the task of
improving their brand by creating a strong web presence targeted
towards potential sponsors. Specifically, this web presence should be
seeking to identify other organizations with similar potential
targets, and mimic the successes of those organizations in
presentation of materials.

The materials being presented should include:
   * A high level overview of OSGeo and what it is
   * A high level overview of the projects that are currently supported
     by OSGeo, targeted towards executive -- rather than
     developer-oriented -- summary
   * A high level overview of how OSGeo achieves its goals in
     supporting these projects
   * How organizations can help support OSGeo in the above task.

This web presence should exist in *addition* to the resources which
are currently used by the community.

It's not clear to me if this effort should be pursued within the
existing marketing community in OSGeo, or pursued by some other group
already existing within OSGeo. It is clear to me that there has not been
a lot of thought put into the current website from the perspective of
someone with experience in marketing. This isn't a bad thing,
neccesarily, but I think in order for OSGeo to continue to grow, this is
going to become more and more of a problem.

Clearly, this is not the sole marketing task for OSGeo: materials to be
used at conferences should continue to be pursued. However, I think to
some extent, OSGeo needs to help projects which help themselves beyond a
certain point. OSgeo's job is to act as the starting point for people to
get *to* the information they need about a project -- not a place to
provide that information. Right now, probably due in part to the level
of participation by the projects themselves in the OSGeo community,
there is a blurry line here, and I think that's one of the things that
should be changed.

It's not entirely clear to me whether the OSGeo drupal website that
currently exists is important to the community. It's possible it is, and
that it could continue to exist in some form. However, I think that it
is not sufficient as an executive overview of what OSGeo is, what it
does, and what each of its proejcts does from the marketing perspective.
It is clear to me that some projects are better at internal marketing
that others -- OSGeo should take the first step for each of these
projects within its own realm, and encourage projects to do their own
work outside of that.

We've built a great community. The explosion of local chapters is
evidence of that. The desire to become an OSGeo project from projects
currently not in incubation is also evidence of that. In order to
continue to grow and succeed in supporting our projects, I think it's
really time to seriously look at how to market OSGeo as an organization
to executives with checkbooks, and I think an improved web presence is a
key part of that task.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best Regards,

--
Prof. Ari Jolma
Environmental Management Information Technology
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
tel: +358 9 4511 address: POBox 5300, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://geoinformatics.tkk.fi

--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com

4

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 09:33:20AM +1100, Cameron Shorter wrote:

Ari,
I think you have made an accurate assessment of OSGeo's need to
re-target our front-door web pages to be more commercially focused.

For the record, almost all of the email Ari forwarded was written by me:
the original was sent to the board list.

  http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2008-December/002799.html

The difficult part which I'm interested to hear your thoughts on are:
* How are we going to resource a web page cleanup?

To be frank, I don't see anyone within OSGeo who is able to make this
type of revamp happen based on the existing skillsets we have so far
demonstrated. Specifically, I'm not aware of anyone with formal work
experience in a marketing firm that I see regularly taking on website
tasks.

I've worked in a marketing company long enough to know that I know
nothing, but no long enough to know more.

If I were to take this on as a task, my approach would be to seek out
marketing organizations with web experience, and request that they
provide a suggestion for how to achieve our goals. Of course, our goals
are only written in a single email by one person, which is clearly
insufficient :slight_smile: Once we have goals -- goals like "Create website content
which does $foo", etc. -- we can more seriously attack the problem, but
I can't say that OSGeo will have the resources to tackle this internally
based on what I've seen so far.

* What will it cost? (So we can budget for it, and compare ROI from web
pages vs presence at conferences)

Again, I'd say that this would be tied to the above -- it would need a
better description/agreement on what needs to be done, followed by an
estimate from an organization familiar with these types of tasks.

* Are there any metrics we can call upon which compare effectiveness of
web marketing vs conference marketing?

I'm not aware of any. However, we do have some experience with
conference marketing -- do we have any metrics for measuring that on its
own?

Regards,
--
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta

5

Christopher Schmidt kirjoitti:

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 09:33:20AM +1100, Cameron Shorter wrote:
  

Ari,
I think you have made an accurate assessment of OSGeo's need to re-target our front-door web pages to be more commercially focused.
    
For the record, almost all of the email Ari forwarded was written by me:
the original was sent to the board list.

Chris is right. Sorry for my email client, which uses Finnish, "kirjoitti" means "wrote".

Ari

--
Prof. Ari Jolma
Environmental Management Information Technology
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
tel: +358 9 4511 address: POBox 5300, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://geoinformatics.tkk.fi

6

On 7-Dec-08, at 4:02 PM, Christopher Schmidt wrote:

Ari,
I think you have made an accurate assessment of OSGeo's need to
re-target our front-door web pages to be more commercially focused.

For the record, almost all of the email Ari forwarded was written by me:
the original was sent to the board list.

Hi Chris and all,
It's great to see all the interest in Marketing lately! It's likely a good time for a recap of the past year and some of the though processes this committee went through. As you can imagine it's a challenging committee to be on but I think we are off to a good start. Many of the questions/issues brought up recently have been on the radar for a while and we're making small steps toward improving on several fronts.

Last year there were a few questions we wanted answered, of which we knew the group could not answer on their own so we hired a firm to help review and guide us. The main question was about brand and communicating with it. A review of our goals, purpose, strategy, etc. was completed and a Marketing Communication Strategy was delivered.[1] It's a tough read and salient points need to be pulled of the document for us to act on. Thank you to those who reviewed it.

The follow up to this document was to be development of improved branding that could be used across mediums - web site & print materials. As we went into the recent wave of Marketing work the committee decided to focus on meeting the needs of the volunteers who want to help market OSGeo and its projects - by providing material they could redistribute. So far this is just in planning. The Exhibition Package [2] includes the development of material to help in face-to-face meetings or conference scenarios. It's important to note that the Package idea is a response to increased requests by members and local chapters for more options and we don't expect OSGeo to indiscriminately fund these packages 100%.

Obviously a key part of the Package is the branded print material. As part of getting this material designed, I expect we'll go through a process of cleaning up the website as well. To date, as you noted, most website work has been done by members who have had the time, skills and interest in doing so. Putting aside some of our budget to have address branding in general - website and print design specifically - is a good idea though somewhat buried in the Package idea.

To sum up, our Communication Strategy was to help find holes and opportunities in current branding and focus. Well branded print and digital materials are critical to supporting our mission, the local chapters and our events around the world. If we can get past the budget questions and aim to get the development started, I think we'll be in good shape. The Marketing Budget 2009 page is not complete, but will be soon.

Thank you very much for all the feedback and comments. I'll follow up shortly on more budget-related issues that I will be looking for even more feedback on.

Tyler

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Marketing_Communication_Strategy_2008
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Exhibition_Pack