Earlier this year, I talked about The Drupal Association stepping further into its mission to better promote Drupal through its channels - especially via Drupal.org. With 20 million unique visitors annually, Drupal.org is a powerful tool to help evaluators move through their Drupal adoption journey. However, our research showed that technical evaluators didn’t find the information they needed and they ultimately left the site to find Drupal information elsewhere.

It was a real missed opportunity that we wanted to solve for. Not only is it our mission to promote Drupal, but helping Drupal businesses thrive is important. Knowing that 69% of code contribution is sponsored by Drupal businesses, it’s imperative that our business community is strong and able to continually support our contributors.

The Association is in a unique position to help these evaluators get inspired and informed about Drupal and to quickly connect them to service provider experts, who can show them how to use Drupal to solve their business challenges. That is why we turned the Drupal.org front page into a Drupal marketing section, giving it new design, copy, and calls to action for visitors to learn more about Drupal 8 and how to Try Drupal. We will continue to iterate the copy, case studies, and call to action on this page and subpages throughout 2017.

The Power of Drupal By Industry

Our next iteration will be the addition of industry vertical pages, which highlight the power of Drupal solutions for various industries.

Each page will explain the impact that Drupal solutions made for well known brands in each industry. The pages will also connect the visitor to an industry expert - a Drupal service provider - who can answer their questions and ultimately build their Drupal solution. Plus, each page highlights featured third-party technology and hosting companies who add value to a Drupal solution.

Our first three industry pages will be for the higher education, government, and the media/entertainment industry verticals. They will launch in Q1 2017.

Here is a work-in-progress mockup of the Higher Education Industry Page.

Sponsors with a history of contribution

As you can see, we only highlight three service providers on each industry page. Naturally we have a global network of experts who we can highlight. So how do we decide who gets promoted on these pages?

While working with the Drupal Association Board, we decided that it is important to continually reward the businesses who contribute back to the Project.

Contribution comes in the form of time, talent, and treasure. We looked at these three categories and decided to rank companies by the issue credits they earned over the last 90 days, what level they are in the Drupal Supporting Partner Program, and how many years they were Supporters. We are using this contribution ranking to invite the top service providers to sponsor the page.

We are also using geo-targeting on each page, showcasing service providers who serve the region that the visitor is located in. That means that each page will highlight three service providers who offer services in the Americas, EMEA, and AP Australia/NZ. This allows us to expand the number of organizations to participate in this program.

Of course, the visitor can still find all of the other amazing Drupal businesses in our ecosystem by going to the marketplace, which can be filtered by industry verticals as well.

We are excited to push our mission work forward on several fronts from promoting Drupal to rewarding contributing organizations. As we launch this program, we want to thank the Drupal Association Board, Acquia, FFW, Lullabot, MediaCurrent, and Phase2 for providing input into the process.

Comments

heykarthikwithu’s picture

This looks really great :+1:

Anonymous’s picture

Nice & shiny design but where's the Why? There's lots of What's:

  • "Solutions for Higher Ed"
  • "71 of the Top 100 universities use Drupal"
  • Scalability
  • Flexibility
  • tailored digital experiences
  • solutions
  • main university websites
  • application development
  • scholarly publishing
  • 100% of Ivy League Schools Use Drupal
  • extensible
  • Tailor your Higher Ed solution by combining the power of Drupal with third party technology
  • Drupal hosting
  • thousands of third party technology integrations
  • maintained by Drupal's open source community(!)
  • distributions of Drupal built for higher ed

I am fully aware this is a work-in-progress mock-up which is great as perhaps there's chance to increase the percentage of Why from 0% to perhaps 25%, hopefully 50%, ideally 75% of the content.

This industry sector is perfect to begin this process of promoting the Why as many - at least the ones I've encountered - do their work from a place of passion for education. This industry is based on sharing information and research, as we share code and workload.

Lately I've been super-impressed with Bryan Ollendyke's (btopro) ELMNS Learning Network: An EdTech Platform for Sustaining Innovation (notice how Bryan manages to get the "Why" into one sentence there with ease) which if you haven't watched his latest video on the most recent updates to the platform you should, whatever your role is in the Drupalsphere is as this sort of project is disrupting major legacy tech spaces and is exactly where we should be focusing our target marketing.

For those who haven't seen the Simon Sinek Why, How, What seminal TED session here's a short edited version - it is something we should, and I thought we were when I saw the Why being highlighted in a previous DA set of meeting notes, and can do.

Why? If we educate those looking to join our community right from the point of entry the reasons why we do this then we have a better chance of them choosing to use Drupal because they believe in what we do. We have a better chance of them understanding how the community works, including those who provide commercial services and support like myself and others, and we set ourselves apart from other choices they may be considering by leaving them with an understanding of what Drupal's USP is, which can be simply put in one word: Freedom.

The Freedom to Tinker (no, you don't have to put those exact words on the marketing page but it's an important phrase) is such an important thing and this current mock-up just doesn't show any of that whatsoever, it looks more like something from back in my proprietary product days, highlighting my partner network, and it would've worked well. But we're not in a proprietary software world, we're in the Free/Libre Open Source Software world.

Please use this massive opportunity to focus and highlight on some of the reasons why people Drupal, why we share code and go to meetings and camps and cons - celebrated8 is a fantastic example of this and shows more of the human side than "here's a great product that everyone else uses and so should you, talk to these people for a quote".

Get the Why, the How, and the What communicated and not only will Drupal continue to lead in this space (higher ed summits always packed!) but will also start to grow market share in other industries too. Focusing on the What's is a game to zero IMHO, because we're so different than the other options out there and should shout out loud about that.

megansanicki’s picture

HI Steve,

You're absolutely right. There are many Whys for Drupal and we can weave that in much better on the front page and Industry pages. I'll work with the team on that. Thanks for the resources. I'll be sure to check them out.

Best,

Megan

Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki

Anonymous’s picture

Hi Megan,

Thanks for your reply! Presuming these industry pages will also be landing pages it's going to be necessary to include the 'Why's on these too.

Cheers,

Steve

nitishchopra’s picture

We can also think of adding names of big giants in higher education like mit media  labs and Howard university, etc.

We can also highlight the fact that 26 % of over all .edu domain sites are in Drupal.

We really appreciate  this move of Drupal Association as it will lead to more contribution as well as aid in decision making.

heykarthikwithu’s picture

highlight the fact that 26 % of over all .edu domain sites are in Drupal

This is really interesting stuff, We could have Universities an active participation with Drupal things :)

megansanicki’s picture

Can you send me the source for this stat? I like to make sure I see that before I add in input like that.

Thanks!

Megan

Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki

megansanicki’s picture

Thanks so much for the positive feedback. We are excited to help the Project in this way.

Can you provide me the source for the stat you suggest? I just like to verify before I use them.

And, yes, we can weave in some of the big names. In time, I can get logos on there but I need permission first. 

Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki

nitishchopra’s picture

Hi,

I have done little research on using Drupal for higher education as well and found the same stat signifying  it's authenticity.

here is the link that that verifies the stat. https://www.acquia.com/resources/collateral/drupal-higher-education-info...

Cheers 

Nitish 

Twitter @nitishchpr

smccabe’s picture

How are categories determined? Won't the top 3 companies just always dominate? We're #2 in commerce commits, but there is no way to official group "Commerce" vs anything else.

megansanicki’s picture

Thanks for the good questions.

I chose the first three industries by looking at which case study categories get the most clicks AND which vertical summits we run at DrupalCon North America. I want to roll these out, learn, and iterate before rolling too many more out. HOWEVER, we will have more. As I talk to companies, I find out what is popular and where people are putting their focus. Ecommerce is one for sure and at the top of the list. Others are High Tech, Healthcare, Pharma/Life Sciences. We also see horizontal solutions as another focus. Ecommerce is a good example and so is DevOps, Security, etc. 

This is certainly a smaller playing field than say the marketplace, so I'm trying to be mindful in how we handle sponsorships. I'm inviting those to participate who have contributed code and support the Drupal Association as a Supporting Partner. And, while there are just a few industry pages, I'm telling sponsors they can only sponsor one industry page. That helps keep the opportunity to more companies. 

So, in the end, all kinds of companies get invited to sponsor. It's all about how you contribute. Some smaller companies were invited to sponsor based on the contribution ranking. It was nice to hear how they appreciated being able to have an opportunity like this even though they are small. Of course, I remind them that they are actually big in terms of how the contribute.

Feel free to contact me at megan at association dot drupal dot org if you want more details.

Megan

 

Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki

kevincrafts’s picture

It's disappointing to not see anything in that mockup related to the contributions to Drupal from the higher ed community.

Instead, there is content about vendor solutions, including OpenEDU, which was a vaporware solution for so many years before finally being published this year with so many problems it actually disabled the automated testing on Drupal.org.

How about giving the contributing institutions some attention? Higher ed is being treated as potential purchasers of Drupal vs. a community who are contributing to project.

http://www.colorado.edu/webcentral/2017/01/03/top-10-contributing-higher...

megansanicki’s picture

Thanks for that feedback. Having people in the industry contribute back is definitely a selling point that we should work into the copy better. 

We are conducting user research interviews this month so I will add this to the feedback. If you have other points, please feel free to share them with me.

Best,

Megan

Megan Sanicki
Executive Director
Drupal Association
twitter: megansanicki

daniellelyrette’s picture

Where can we find information about how to have our work featured on these industry pages?