Draft: 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

Proposal status

The draft attempts to balance all of the above, hopefully making it clear enough when we can have this group be autonomous and when to otherwise coordinate. We need more people with more capacity than @sabderemane and I to take this further. We thought creating the draft might help.

[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.

[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]

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]

Thanks all for the feedback, keep it coming :) And if you have ideas for things the group could do as well, particularly in the context of our website redesign but all other channels relevant too. The ideas might not change the charter but it’ll certainly be inspiring for others.

@carltongibson yep I think we do need that mention of historical / just structural challenges. In my opinion it will help that we treat this seriously enough to produce "marketing deliverables" (just docs really), that will help the knowledge transfer more easily. And I think it also helps that we’ve just grown the foundation side of Django a lot. It’s easier for new people to get involved with this kind of volunteering, and it’s easier to retain people who want to take a step back but stay involved in advisory capacity. Will mull over how to write this.

[vossisboss]

Hey y'all. Just wanted to chime in and say that I would happy to be a Wagtail liason for this group along with Thibaud. There is plenty we already have to do for Wagtail but there will definitely be opportunities for us to join forces and I would like to be tuned in to this group's activities so we can identify and shape those opportunities together.

[thibaudcolas]

👋 I’ve updated the proposal title and added a disclaimer that @sabderemane aren’t super confident in taking this further, just due to the amount of work:

[…] We need more people with more capacity than @sabderemane and I to take this further, and thought creating the draft might help.

And merged feedback from @benjaoming as-is. Still keen to get more feedback! From DjangoCon Europe discussions, the fundamental issues we discussed that need addressing are:

1. Volunteer capacity too low for marketing workload
2. What we should do as free volunteer work vs. paid work
3. Separate needs for a strategy vs. execution