The Marketing team promotes WordPress to current and future users and contributors. We create and amplify campaigns to support the growth of the WordPress project.
Our work is tracked on the Marketing Tasks Board on the WordPress organization’s GitHub. If you are planning a Marketing Table at a Contributor Event, please let us know in the Slack channel.
You can be part of the #marketing channel on Slack. Join our next Weekly Marketing Chat at: Tuesday 15:00 UTC.
Diary dates
The Marketing WordPress to Agencies and Clients subgroup focuses on materials and resources for agencies to market WordPress to clients, as well as providing technical and business information to larger businesses and enterprises.
SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. Timestamp:
https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1511363006000225
Notes compiled by @meher
@maedahbatool, @meher, @harryjackson1221, @skarjune – main attendees.
@gidgey – For admin support
@AfshanaDiya, @dhruvpandya, @sagarprajapati – At the start of the meeting.
@mcdwayne, @miker – Missed the meeting.
At the start of the meeting, there was confusion for the time of the meeting. Is it 15:00 UTC OR 16:00 UTC? This is because of the daylight to standard time. @gidgey confirmed that the meeting time is 8 am pacific (15:00 UTC in Standard, 16:00 in Daylight Savings).
If someone sees the #marketing meeting time listed improperly somewhere please post the link on the #marketing slack channel or pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” @gidgey.
@maedahbatool and @skarjune have been discussing how to proceed with Case Studies.
General consensus at last meeting was that we could summarize cases with HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. posts in the Handbook, but the best format for distribution of Case Studies would be PDF, to provide for a generic rich content format that can be widely shared and retain WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ Marketing as the source with a proper license for sharing. More discussion of acquisition, formatting, and distribution of Case Studies is needed.
@maedahbatool suggested to stick to the preview case study which got published.
@skarjune shared TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. card for the task – Read and format Survey answers. No work has been done as the members who were going to work, seem no longer involved in this task.
@maedahbatool suggested that there were total 13 WordPress agencies who have shared their findings. Some of the data which is submitted, does not permit to reveal client name and companies. This seem an interesting challenge.
@skarjune explained that the survey answers should be useful for Agencies to either adopt WordPress or explain to a reluctant client. He say that the cases need to be reviewed, edited, formatted, and check with the respondent that will be published. If no one is interest at this time, maybe this can be considered at #WCUS Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/..
@harryjackson1221 suggested that we need some sort of style guide. He said he will get @miker to help him out and see what they can come up with. @skarjune suggested it is a good idea to draft for a group review, perhaps for for feedback during WCUS Contributor Day.
@maedahbatool suggested that we go with quality not quantity. We should first preference to all those who have submitted all form details.
@harryjackson1221, said that he can procure some other cases as nice as the sample provided, as some of the answers have a lot of info, others not so much.
@skarjune suggested that publish a set of 3 cases to start with, that might generate more responses.
The WordPress Marketing Team has published it’s WordPress Usage Survey Report polling agencies and their clients, along with web hosting companies and enterprises, about their use of WordPress and their perspective on the web platform. The survey represents views from a focus group providing insight into why and how professional web companies employ WordPress for client solutions, and it examines reasons and barriers for using WordPress to deliver project solutions for clients and as a web platform for extensions and enterprise use.
The Marketing Team offers this WordPress Usage Survey to guide our work in creating resources with the hope that it benefits you as an agency, client, enterprise, or host in your WordPress work.
The report is licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. Please see Other Information of the terms of this license. When using or citing the work, you should not imply endorsement by WordPress or the author or the affirmer.
Access the WordPress Usage Survey Report in the WordPress Marketing Handbook.
The Marketing WordPress to Agencies and Clients subgroup focuses on materials and resources for agencies to market WordPress to clients, as well as providing technical and business information to larger businesses and enterprises.
SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. Timestamp:
https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C0GKJ7TFA/p1508943724000108
Notes compiled by @skarjune
@skarjune, @sagarprajapati, @miker, @harryjackson1221, @vishalmukadam, @meher, @dhruvpandya, @mcdwayne, @gidgey
Group reminded that planning is organized in TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing.:
https://trello.com/b/pVXvgaVQ/marketing-to-agencies-enterprises-and-clients
Materials are organized in Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B9wRJsOfSKgzQ3NmRGVEVlNSN0U
@skarjune gave an update on the WordPress Usage Survey Report. He had used LibreOffice locally to roll up the data from the survey and format, rather than use the Google default Responses layout. However, the ODT/ODS files didn’t look good when uploaded to Drive, so everything was reworked in Google Sheets & Docs to produce a PDF with the source files available.
The WordPress Usage Survey Report document was shared for discussion and comments:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FWPgD8xWhs1vT_qSgQd8DF0GGxh8DhAKnx3LYvj52Pc/edit#
@harryjackson1221: Who were the 88 people interviewed?
@skarjune: Not a BIG survey, but more a focus group of dedicated professional users. Demographics show almost half were contributors, mostly from agencies, some client companies, enterprises, and hosts.
@miker: What is the objective of the report? Are there specific plans for using it?
@skarjune: To help understand the needs and concerns of agency and related users. To provide agencies & enterprises information about why professionals choose WordPress. Mostly we wanted to see how they felt about Reasons vs Barriers with some background on where they are coming from.
Group agreed there was a lot of data to look over with interesting results. @skarjune will complete the formatting and publishing of the report for the Marketing Team.
Case Studies was raised, but no one working on that project was able to attend and update on it.
WordPress Marketing Handbook was discussed, which is a MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. project for Marketing, and has been previously discussed in some subgroups. We referred to the Marketing Team Handbook Project Doc that has an outline on this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16isbEfT-nxlO2D_Cb0hI_cYFK8ZmQW4oZDXCWKlpuPY/edit#heading=h.ncr1kqkrl2sy
@Skarjune is working on the Marketing Handbook framework:
https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/handbook/
This is a live section of WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, but it’s not linked on our menu or pages yet.
@skarjune: Handbooks are a custom post typeCustom Post Type WordPress can hold and display many different types of content. A single item of such a content is generally called a post, although post is also a specific post type. Custom Post Types gives your site the ability to have templated posts, to simplify the concept. for WP Teams to publish their general information and resources.
@vishalmukadam: Handbook should be written in simple way which is understandable and easy for WordPress users to get the hands on what WP teams have created.
@miker: Add a section right below Who we are on Why somebody should want to get involved.
@harryjackson1221: Suggest the landing page have an outline of the handbook itself.
@miker suggested a number of sections for team processes: tools and resources for creating materials, description of personas, creating artifacts for customer journeyCustomer Journey The Customer Journey is the User Experience (UX) beginning with the onboarding process and continuing through all interactions with the WordPress platform, community, and ecosystem., interacting with other teams, project management examples. @mcdwayne is setting up sections for those with Google Docs.
@skarjune: We can have a lot on the Team in an About Section, but most users will be looking for Resources to take away.
@vishalmukadam suggested that the Handbook outline could be part of the upcoming Contributors Day at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US. @mcdwayne can help coordinate and some mentioned they could only participate remotely. @gidgey said she will be leading the Marketing Team at WCUS unless Sara does. The plan is onboarding, momentum, and work.
Discussion of whether or not Personas should be developed for use throughout Marketing subgroups and perhaps with other teams. We’ve developed some, but not used them, and they haven’t been used in work with other teams requesting deliverables from Marketing. More discussion is needed at a Meta level regarding any work on personas.
@skarjune checked with Meta and @otto42 indicates that the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license is used for distribution of WordPress.org documents. That is what @sararosso used for WordPress Reasons, so CC0 will be used for the WordPress Usage Survey Report in PDF for distribution.
The Marketing WordPress to Agencies and Clients subgroup focuses on materials and resources for agencies to market WordPress to clients, as well as providing technical and business information to larger businesses and enterprises.
Notes compiled by @vishalmukadam & @skarjune
No one has been assigned to the “WordPress White Papers – Candidates for Public Domain” To Do item in TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing., and @maedahbatool volunteered to work on that, since she has worked on writing on such topics, and will start up a list in Drive. @mcdwayne reminded the group that we are partnering with CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. on an initiative to promote PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. updates.
WordPress-white-papers-candidates-for-public-domain
We discussed the ongoing need for a means of publishing resources, as people are asking about how to get our materials, and we’re being encouraged to make them available. We noted that various teams use handbooks, Drive, or githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ for materials, and a wiki was also suggested. @vishalmukadam said that a standard Handbook is the best option, since beginners would be able to easily find and access Marketing materials in one place from our home page.
Team decided it’s time to Create a Handbook for Marketing.
@skarjune volunteered to work on getting a standard WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ O2P2 P2 or O2 is the term people use to refer to the Make WordPress blog. It can be found at https://make.wordpress.org/. Handbook structure in place for Marketing, as he’s created content for other Team handbooks.
We also talked about plans to promote future survey drives through the WP Dashboard as a way for outreach.
Case Studies was discussed, we now have 13 submissions, and there are also external case studies that might be suitable for use. Main concern is how to distribute Case Studies, especially in what format, and HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. pages or PDF documents were compared. Both are common standards supported by most browsers and devices. While HTML would be better for mobile devices, PDF would allow for wider distribution apart from WordPress.org. HTML would be easy to edit, but we might want to lock the content to respect the sources for cases to prevent any abuse of our materials.
General consensus is that we could summarize cases with HTML posts in the Handbook, but the best format for distribution of Case Studies would be PDF, to provide for a generic rich content format that can be widely shared and retain WordPress.org Marketing as the source with a proper license for sharing. The analogy of how Infographics travel across the web as PDFs or graphics was given as an example.
More discussion of acquisition, formatting, and distribution of Case Studies is needed.
@skarjune reported that the WordPress Usage Survey has closed and shared some bits of it:
He’ll complete formatting the results and share a document in Drive very soon for all Marketing members to review, and we hope to publish the results in the near future.
Meeting attended by: @skarjune @gidgey @maedahbatool @parth @mcdwayne @afshanadiya @westcounty.media @zakkath @tokyobiyori @harryjackson1221 @vishalmukadam @anafransilva
The Marketing WordPress to Agencies and Clients subgroup focuses on materials and resources for agencies to market WordPress to clients, as well as providing technical and business information to larger businesses and enterprises.
@anafransilva updated us on the Case Study progress:
Here’s how the people who submitted heard about the survey:
2 = WP.org
6 = personal associate/word of mouth
2 = Facebook
2 = Twitter
There’s more work to do.
@mcdwayne said he has been asked “Where will these case studies live?” and “Who will get these case studies?”
I’d think those answers were provided in both the messages we put out.
But maybe that’s not clear enough right now?
They’ll live in the portfolio – and the .org Marketing team (subgroup Agencies etc) will get them. Do we feel we need/can make this clearer somehow? Maybe in the email/message we send – rather than in another public message?
There are 13 case studies submitted as of 8/23.
The discussion turned to producing a finished case study now and continue collecting data and submissions
It looks like most of us are in favour of having a ‘rolling’ deadline (ie; not a deadline) but producing something when we reach X amount of valuable case study submissions – does that sound about right?
Would it help to reach out to the agencies that submitted with some clarifying questions to see if we can help then mine more nuggets of gold? And if so, who would be the best person to do so? As in to make sure we don’t cross lines / interfere with existing relations?
So, with the ideas we’ve put together – our outreach is centred around two key groups:
There are three tasks that could do with being picked up around this
Community outreach: email WCs & meetups in lieu of contacting Comm team directly.
Last time we spoke, someone had agreed to contact Community team and spread the word (I can’t remember who). In lieu of that there are other smaller bits we can do like spread the message in location-specific Slack channels.
There are lots of us here! All it needs is one message in the ‘general’ channel of a Slack team you have access to, with a brief message about what this is and a link to survey.
Next one, outreach to agency owners. There are 56 in total on the list – we’ve emailed 12.
Email template in Trello card.
So, there are lots of other people to email still.
Lastly is emailing Twitter influencers and asking for promotional support: email template available in Trello card.
We were supposed to find a ‘Tweet now’ button for this, but to move this task along, we can forgo that and just email them
@mcdwayne There are 2 larger projects that other teams and Ma.tt have asked us to do, need to get these moving forward somehow:
1) Global WP Translation day
Which ma.tt asked us to work on es.wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/
2) The CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team asked us to create content aimed at the site owner to get them to upgrade to PHP7.
Meeting adjourned early.
Notes taken by @mcdwayne
Attendance : @anafransilva @bridgetwillard @mcdwayne @yvettesonneveld @anafransilva @vishalmukadam @iviolini @maedahbatool @prathameshp
The Marketing WordPress to Agencies and Clients subgroup focuses on materials and resources for agencies to market WordPress to clients, as well as providing technical and business information to larger businesses and enterprises.
Details are available in the Slack Marketing channel, including resource links. @anafransilva led the meeting.
@skarjune gave an update on the WordPress Usage survey. 71 responses have come in, and the data is very preliminary as we need more responses and analysis. Still, we were able to review some trends.
We looked at the Source for hearing about the survey, though not all responses provided that. Blogs were the primary Source, primarily the WP Tavern post along with the original WordPress.org post, then some response via the Facebook Advanced User Group. We seem to be reaching a targeted audience that follows WordPress news, and we want to continue more outreach.
| SOURCE | COUNT | PCT |
| Blog (WP Tavern, Nuzzel) | 19 | 36% |
| WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ | 16 | 30% |
| 8 | 15% | |
| Personal Associate | 4 | 8% |
| News Website | 2 | 4% |
| WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. | 2 | 4% |
| 1 | 2% | |
| Podcast | 1 | 2% |
Agencies is at the top of the list for the Industry type in responses, so this is a good sign that we will be able to collect Case Studies from our outreach efforts.
| INDUSTRY | COUNT |
| Agency | 20 |
| Internet | 10 |
| Small Business | 10 |
| OTHER | 7 |
| Software | 5 |
| Business Services | 5 |
| Education | 3 |
| Web Host | 2 |
| Media | 2 |
| Nonprofit | 1 |
| Retail | 1 |
High points for Reasons to use WordPress are expected, as it’s highly regarded for Ease of Use, Extensibility, and Availability of themes and plugins.
| REASONS 1-high, 5-Not at all | RANK |
| Extensibility | 1.8 |
| Ease of Use | 1.8 |
| Open SourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. | 1.9 |
| Themes & Plugins Availability | 2.1 |
| Community | 2.2 |
| Integrations Availability | 2.2 |
| Cost | 2.2 |
| Documentation | 2.3 |
| Search Engine Optimization | 2.4 |
| Scalability | 2.6 |
| AccessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) | 2.6 |
| Multilingual | 2.9 |
WordPress users have some moderate concerns, and @skarjune speculated that debate on the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ editor project could be an example of why Road Map is the highest barrier. However, concerns about Security and Performance could be false myths, as there are many ways to remedy those.
| BARRIERS 1-High, 5-minor | RANK |
| Road map | 3.3 |
| Security | 3.4 |
| Performance | 3.4 |
| Maintenance | 3.5 |
| Scalability | 3.6 |
| Ecommerce | 3.6 |
| Missing features | 3.7 |
| Architecture | 3.7 |
| Support | 3.7 |
| Workflow | 3.7 |
| PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. code base | 4.0 |
| Licensing | 4.2 |
As we get more data and do some analysis, the Usage survey should provide some guidance for all the subgroups in determining what kind of White Papers are needed in our Marketing resources.
@anafransilva finalised the Marketing Message and the group found it ready to publish. We want to add a sample Case Study as an example of how the survey responses will be used. @bridgetwillard started one in the Drive, @skarjune needs to revise that as it was only a test entry by him, and he’ll produce a pretty PDF document to go with the message. @anafransilva and @skarjune will work on this for next week to be published on August 2.
@mcdwayne shared the Marketing Message for Agencies being used to promote the call for Case Studies, which can be used by anyone soliciting agencies to respond. Already several members are performing outreach to contacts in their networks and using the Agency Survey Tracker to record their work.
We discussed if we need to make a list of agencies that we know of or that should be contacted. We felt that this would be a very big project that could be difficult to complete. Also, it would create a target list of agencies, and we had previously discussed this and determined that we did NOT want to appear to be selecting specific agencies that would be promoted by publishing their case studies. Even if we did a thorough job of contacting a wide range of agencies, just one complaint of why a particular agency wasn’t contacted might appear problematic.
Instead of creating a list, we will continue to pursue outreach with our own P2P networks, via Community, and through influencers in the ecosystem, and we’ll track our contacts. We do want to reach as many agencies as possible, we want to attract quality cases, and we want to be transparent about the process of finding and selecting Case Studies to publish.
We reviewed the Email Template to Twitter Influencers to promote the Case Studies survey. We liked the nice tone, clear message, and single call to action with a hashtag and sample Tweet:
Agencies, the marketing team at WP.org needs you! Submit your case studies here: #WPAgencySurvey
The message to influencers focuses on just the Case Studies survey, which is a current need, although the template can be easily tweeked for a version to use for the Usage survey.
There was interest in developing some kind of Tweet Now button to automate the follow-through, and @vishalmukadam will follow up on how to do that.
We considered reaching out to individual WordCamps that are coming up soon, but we’ll check with some Community leaders to ask if they could do a broad outreach to both WordCamps and Meetups to promote the surveys. @bridgetwillard and @skarjune will check with @andreamiddleton and @chanthaboune about that.
Team members are updating the TrelloTrello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. cards for tasks management as work continues. We’ll publish new posts on the surveys next week, and we’ll continue with outreach to promote the surveys.
To get involved with the Marketing to Agencies and Clients subgroup, or any other subgroup of the Marketing team, see the post on Welcome to the Marketing Team — Here’s What You Need to Know.
Our next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, August 23.
The Marketing to Agencies & Clients (+enterprises) team was convened and led by @skarjune.
Slack Backscroll has details and links
There were many in attendance for Make WordPress Marketing at the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe (WCEI) Contributor Day, with more people than had been expected, so existing and new contributors met, shared ideas, and worked together. The group went over current projects, reviewed assets in the Google Drive, and @mcdwayne started up a Trello Board for project management. Working remotely @skarjune launched the two surveys with an Open Call post.
There is much interest in gathering Agency Cases, though there is some concern and confusion about the survey process and its constraints. Some members want to use cases that already exist on Agency or other vendor websites, but they did not want to redo the cases in the survey format, and there was concern about having to get a client’s permission to use their name.
@skarjune explained that the team had already agreed upon a policy to use Opt-in mechanisms on the Case Studies survey for permission to use the Agency and Client names, to abide by the Privacy Policy of WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/, and to be clear that we have the right to edit the material. The use of a client name and website URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org would be problematic, if the client had not authorized nor expected that to be published, and we want to avoid any such issues. So, we have an explicit agency contact verify those permissions in the survey form.
Given the potential hurdles for Case Studies, we discussed the need to encourage agencies to submit cases and how to best do that. Rather than have the group create a list of targeted top agencies, members will individually contact agencies about the opportunity. There was much helpful discussion by team members about what kinds of cases to solicit, ways for getting agencies interested, and how to repurpose existing cases through our process. We need to highlight the incentive that sharing cases will promote WordPress and educate the community, along with highlighting the agency’s great work. We should create a new post to explain and promote the Case Studies project better.
We were reminded us to use the Agency Survey Tracker to record who has contacted which agencies. We don’t want to duplicate efforts, and we want to be transparent about how we assembled our cases, as some will come in organically while some will come via invitation from members. @andonette and @skarjune have client cases to use as sample cases to mock up as examples to demonstrate the format and how the cases will be used, and @gidgey is helping with the mockups.
@andonette volunteered to take the lead on the Case Studies project.
We have received nearly 50 WordPress Usage survey responses starting with the launch at WCEU, with Facebook and Twitter sharing, and from a blog post by @pollyplummer on WP Tavern. Unfortunately we also saw some adverse comments about the Marketing Team from a cynical agency owner, and various Team members responded to that thread. This reminds us that as a WordPress.org team we want to follow ethical guidelines and use transparency in our work for the WordPress community, lest anyone suspect there’s some hidden agenda.
The Marketing Team for WordPress announces an open call for agencies, client companies, and enterprises using WordPress to respond to surveys gathering Case Studies for WordPress and assessing global WordPress Usage trends. We want to hear about how you’ve used WordPress for client solutions and as a web content management platform. The Case Studies along with the Usage Survey report will help us create resources for Marketing WordPress.
At the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US 2016 Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. in Philadelphia, PA, the Marketing to Agencies and Clients subgroup decided to create a survey for agencies to submit user cases demonstrating great solutions with WordPress. The Case Studies will be part of a Resource Guide for agencies & freelancers to market WordPress to clients that will also provide a Fact Sheet, FAQ, and other information on the features, benefits, and provided value of WordPress.
“Content Management is not just about technology; it is about the nature of your business and content, people, processes, and tools.”
—Ann Rockley, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Strategy, New Riders, Berkeley, 2003.
Our goal is to identify the needs and pain points of stakeholders (both agency & client-side) for web projects, so that we can provide supporting information about WordPress to address those needs and to counter any obstacles or myths. Ongoing discussions determined that we could also provide a general survey to poll agencies, their clients, and larger enterprises about their use of WordPress and their perspective about the web platform. The Usage Survey was designed to capture basic trends and the outlook for using WordPress to deliver project solutions for clients as well as a web platform for broad use by enterprises.
We’ve reviewed a range of polls and surveys about WordPress. Matt Mullenweg, a founding developer of WordPress and founder & CEO of Automattic, has provided rich statistics on WordPress adoption in his annual “State of the Word” talks at WordCamps over the years. WordPress hosting businesses have surveyed companies and clients about WordPress. Content Management and Content Marketing news sites provide comparative guides on CMS technologies. High-level industry reports review the commercial web space, including the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management and The Forrester Wave on Web Content Management Systems.
“WordPress has always grown organically through word of mouth and its passionate community, but the hundreds of millions being spent advertising against WP has started to have an impact, especially for folks only lightly familiar with us.”
—Matt Mullenweg, “WP Growth Council,” Matt Mullenweg | Unlucky in Cards, December 2, 2016, https://ma.tt/2016/12/wp-growth-council/
The WordPress Marketing team aims to continue the organic growth of WordPress through its merits and with the support of our dedicated community. We rely upon the engagement of the global WordPress community and the input of users from all parts of the world across industries large and small. We invite you to participate in this process by providing a Case Study of how WordPress solved a client need and by answering some questions about your company and its use of WordPress.
As an agency, please select one representative to offer cases and respond to the survey. If you are a freelancer, respond only if working full-time as a web service provider. If you work in a large enterprise using WordPress, determine the one best staff or officer to respond. These surveys will run through July 14, 2017.
We’ve extended the surveys through August & September to allow more outreach and case preparation.
