Proposal for marketing working group

[thibaudcolas]

This is a draft charter written by @sabderemane and I for a new Marketing working group for Django, in charge of both strategy and execution. It’s inspired by our website and social media working groups, though this is a bit more complex as marketing overlaps with a lot of existing teams’ remit.

• Marketing work has to be coordinated with a lot of other aspects of the project / foundation
• It needs a lot of strategic thinking at times, and a lot of just pure execution at other times
• Lots of the execution relies on having access to relatively sensitive systems (website publishing, social media)
• The execution also relies on the group having enough autonomy when possible, and enough stakeholder review when needed

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The draft attempts to balance all of that, hopefully making it clear enough when we can have this group be autonomous and when to otherwise coordinate.

[tim-schilling]

This looks great! It's generic enough to get people moving, but provides the necessary specifics. The only other minor thing would be unless the board is requiring kpis, I think that could be left to the team to decide to implement.

[tim-schilling]

May be helpful to also include tools as a possible expenditure. I'm thinking something like figma

[thibaudcolas]

I expect this will be a must, but I’m a bit hesitant to define this in the initial charter as people on the group might have opinions?

[tim-schilling]

I don't think it should call out Figma, but it can call out that the WG can spend money on tools. Or that this can be revisited on a as needed basis.

The no allocated budget line with an exception for hiring a consultant reads that there's no budget without a governance change. I guess I'm suggesting it be flexible.

[thibaudcolas]

Got quite good feedback privately so far, so I think this is ready for wider review, still some rough edges here and there.

[czue]

Looks useful! One thing that might be helpful is saying more about the expectations for membership. E.g. what types of hard skills would be useful (I assume writing and design would feature) as well as the expectations around time commitement for involvement. Given it sounds like a serious effort, we might want to filter for serious people.

[czue]

Is there a chance we would want to have the social media WG absorbed/disbanded once the marketing WG was in place? Unlike website and online community, it feels like social media is ~entirely a subset of marketing.

[benjaoming]

I think it's better to have individual sub-WGs with clear-cut work. So the Social Media working group would continue, but with a more well-defined task thanks to the parent Marketing WG.

I don't mind that Marketing WG makes its own executive calls on Social Media posts.

[thibaudcolas]

Yep we have discussed this heaps. In the end I feel like there’s plenty enough to do, that we could use 5-10 volunteers focused on social media, and 10 or so on other marketing activities. It felt to me like smaller groups would work better than one big one.

Day to day, I’d hope lots of discussions are held as one big group with everyone involved in this space rather than siloed per group. It’d largely just be the "execution" that is kept separate.

[carltongibson]

Hey @thibaudcolas @sabderemane — this is good.

As I read it, I half-feel — "half"! — that we're missing a mention of historical challenges. Namely, many times folks have tried to get moving on this and failed for lack of ability to Get to Yes, lining up all the stake holders, especially combined with the rolling nature of the Board membership. (i.e. Just as someone is making progress, or getting close, their term expires, they leave the Board, and even if they can hand off, there's a loss of momentum which kills the efforts.)

I'm totally happy with what's written here — delegated powers etc. But we block ourselves, through lack of clarity on why things take ages in Django-land. A specific, this group's whole purpose is to avoid that problem would help have something to point to, and might shake out a few more points worth making. 🤷

I did say I'd be SC liaison to begin, so you can fill me in there if you like :)

[benjaoming]

After pondering if the Fundraising WG had overlaps, I didn't really find any, and I think this looks great 👍

Have some suggestions, that's all...

[benjaoming]

Suggested change

	The working group is responsible for planning and execution of marketing activities, and for advising the DSF Board on strategic decisions related to marketing. The goal of those marketing activities is to:
	The working group is responsible for:
	* Planning and execution of marketing activities
	* Proposing new strategies for marketing activities
	* Advising the DSF Board on strategic decisions related to marketing and strategic communication
	The goals of those marketing activities are:

[benjaoming]

I don't think I captured it perfectly above, but I wanted the 3 points above to convey:

• (responsible+mandate for implementing marketing strategies approved by DSF board)
• (responsible for proposing NEW marketing strategies that DSF board approves)
• (advising DSF on marketing and strategic communication)

We could also try to define a bit more what a "marketing activity" vs a "marketing strategy" is. I guess no one is really confused, so maybe that would just be fluff 🤷

[benjaoming]

I tried to squeeze in something about "strategic communication"... I dunno, but to sort of counter-balance the mindset of commercial marketing? This can maybe lead to some discussions about "quality over quantity" in the KPIs that the marketing would orient towards.

We're asking ourselves really deep questions about what the Django brand is, why it's a trusth-worthy technology and community, and what sort of messaging and activities can keep us there on the long term. At the end of the day, most activities are a sort of marketing, whether that's intentional or not 🙂

Example: Blog posts (without any sense of marketing messages nor intentions) from the Steering Council about Django's future are actually great marketing 😄

[benjaoming]

Suggested change

	- Ensure that Django is represented clearly and positively across all channels that are relevant to our audiences (such as developers, organisations, educators, open source contributors, etc).
	- Ensure that Django is represented clearly and positively across all channels that are relevant to our audiences (such as developers, organisations, educators, open source contributors, etc).
	- Increasing strategic coherence of activities across our communication channels

[benjaoming]

Suggested change

	- Management of the "www" djangoproject.com website content, in particular the Django blog and other content pages, excluding fundraising pages.
	- Management of the "www" djangoproject.com website content, in particular the Django blog and other channels that are closely related to marketing.

I would just remove it - I know there is a Fundraising WG. But maybe we can live with the overlap, rather than listing it out? If the Marketing WG is the umbrella of sub-WG that executes on specific channels, then the Marketing WG should simply always be responsible for not interfering... or maybe it would do so with good reason 🤷

[ulgens]

Wouldn't it be better if it were a joint responsibility?

[benjaoming]

I don't believe much in joint responsibility 😄 (it often ends up in no responsibility)

The issue is the same for Website and Social Media WGs..

For the blog content, I think we're trying to find a solution for a specific part of the website with no clear ownership.

Other than that, the entire website is marketing, if framed the right way.

I think spelling out something specific will be tricky. Always good to have clarity, but not always possible. I think that clarity is better found in aiming the group as an umbrella marketing group that does guidelines, strategies, plans, sometimes content when it's vulnerable to marketing considerations.. but mainly to cut out the work for other groups. It should rarely intersect with their work, but maybe an overlap in individual group membership will make this more easy and obvious.

[benjaoming]

I think it's better to have individual sub-WGs with clear-cut work. So the Social Media working group would continue, but with a more well-defined task thanks to the parent Marketing WG.

I don't mind that Marketing WG makes its own executive calls on Social Media posts.