Marketing goals and strategy

Marketing goals and strategy#

Our goals#

Measure of progress#

In the short-term, our goal is simply to start blogging more reliably according to the principles described below. For this reason, our goal is to have at least:

  • one blog post every two weeks

  • one mailing list e-mail every two months

We’ll revisit this goal once we’ve built up enough momentum to focus on improving our conversion efficiency.

Our audience#

Assume that our blog and mailing list is made up of research scientists, educators, and administrators at universities that are interested in learning how to do their work more effectively with open source tools, what improvements are happening in the open source ecosystem, how they can get better value out of 2i2c, and have an interest in 2i2c’s open way of working.

The ideas we want to be associated with#

Generally, ideas that align with our value proposition. For example:

2i2c is…

  • A leader of open science practices and principles.

  • An enabler of scientific impact via our communities.

  • An enabler of open source contribution.

  • A vehicle of shared impact with its collaborators.

Our product is…

  • A reliable service you can trust on the cloud.

  • An easy way to get all the resources your community needs for their workflows.

  • A way to access cutting edge environments for interactive computing.

Constraints and considerations#

  • We have no dedicated communications and marketing capacity, so we do our best with limited resources by integrating external communications into our workflows.

  • We do most of our work in public and in asynchronous spaces with breadcrumbs of activity.

  • Much of our impact happens in non-2i2c spaces, like open source communities or member community actions.

  • Many of our member communities see us as a collaborator with shared impact.

Communications strategy#

With these goals and considerations in mind, here’s a lightweight strategy:

  • Communicate by observing activity and sharing impact and learning.

    • For our team: Do our work asynchronously and in public, with all the information needed to communicate impact and learning.

    • For communities: use our communication channels (support, Slack, etc) to learn when communities hit milestones.

  • Blog any time we have impact or when we learn (for communities, in product development, in open source).

  • Use “index and summary posts” to help readers navigate our steady stream of blog posts.

  • Embed a call to action in every blog post (e.g., a link to a survey, sign up for our mailing list, give us feedback, etc).

  • Share credit liberally for communities, funders, etc that particularly supported an effort.

  • Encourage anyone to do this in a non-2i2c space, but keep a link to the external effort on our blog.

This will give us a steady stream of impact and stories that is low-effort. These data points will make it much easier to create more complex pitches, grants, impact reports, etc.

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