CiviCRM sprints are a tremendous opportunity to get involved with the community while supporting the project. But, they can be a bit off-putting for non-developers because there is often a perception that they’re geared towards writing code. There are always opportunities for non-developers to get involved with CiviCRM, and this year’s post-CiviCon Colorado sprint is no different. In fact, we hope to pull together a team of people focused on marketing CiviCRM to current and new potential users. If you’re on the fence about attending the sprint, read on!
We listed one of our 2016 operational objectives as forming “project teams” around the primary areas of the overall project, including development of the software (Development Team), management of the community (Community Team) and marketing CiviCRM (Marketing Team). Our role as the Core Team is to enable the community to contribute to each team and to coordinate their efforts to achieve our vision of developing and promoting an amazing CRM that all organizations – regardless of their size, budget, or focus – can access to engage their contacts and achieve their missions.
Marketing CiviCRM is a community effort
We’re creating a more structured marketing agenda for the Colorado sprint for 2 reasons; 1) our marketing needs a lot of help and 2) we want people to have non-technical opportunities to support the project. So, if you’re on the fence about coming to the sprint, it’s time to stop straddling it (ouch) and register for the sprint today!
What we plan to focus on
The bulk of the work will be focused on improving CiviCRM’s website and corresponding resources. After all, this represents the single largest marketing asset for the project, and is the best medium for representing CiviCRM to new users and deepening engagement with current users. It’s ambitious, but here’s a list of items we’d love to tackle:
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Site SEO and content marketing strategy
We need some serious help with CiviCRM’s SEO, from technical fixes to content updates. Ideally these efforts will result in specific SEO guidelines for the community that can be adopted when publishing content to the website. -
Social media plan
We need some guidance on a better approach to using social media to promote CiviCRM. And, we need more people pitching in to keep our efforts consistent and ongoing. -
Documentation
We recently rolled out new documentation and need to continue to refine and improve it. Our documentation is a vital resource for new and current users of CiviCRM, so it’s important to keep it up to date and accurate. -
Website updates
This is the big one… we’re working on improvements now to the site to support and improve it as a legitimate portal for users, providing content and capabilities based on user groups and roles. At the same time, we need help improving the site’s content and structure, refining both to be more intuitive and relevant while consolidating content from our wiki to the website. -
CiviCRM data and process improvements
We coordinate the development of an incredible CRM, but we need help using it! Our own data and processes need refinement. We need to focus on improving the quality of our data, reducing its complexity, and better leveraging it to grow engagement with the project.
These are 5 big efforts, and there’s more to the agenda that we could potentially undertake. All efforts at improving the marketing of CiviCRM are welcome. We’re sitting at [civistats:active-sites] today and we have a goal of reaching 12,000 by the end of the year. We need your help and participation to get there. Hope to see you at the sprint!
