[Marketing] How should OSGeo Marketing spend $10K

[Jo Cook]

Hi All,

My comments inline:


On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Daniel Morissette <dmorissette at mapgears.com
> wrote:

> Hi Cameron, all,
>
> I'll answer with two different hats:
>
> 1- As a OSGeo community member who is also the lead of a local chapter:
>
> My experience from trying to organize OSGeo's presence at events in the
> past is that DVDs/USBs/Stickers might be nice to give away, but to make a
> real impact, you'd need a couple of simple flyers that explain efficiently
> what OSGeo is about, what it does, and why visitors should care about it.
> This was a blocker for us (the Quebec chapter) and would be even more
> important than DVDs/USBs/Stickers and local groups don't have the
> time/resource/knowledge to prepare that.
>


> If this material already exists then great, let's promote it and not focus
> solely on the DVDs. It's easy to send out a PDF to organizers that they can
> print locally at very low cost. As an active member of OSGeo I was not able
> to find anything relevant last time I checked, so we ended up abandoning
> our free OSGeo booth due to lack of contents (and as the organizer of the
> rest of the event I didn't have time to work on that). If the material had
> existed in English we could have translated it, but I could not even find a
> relevant English flyer.
>


> All this to say that personally I am questioning whether it is really
> worth sending out DVDs/USBs/Stickers to 50 - 100 events around the world
> when we are lacking a simple PDF in multiple languages that local people
> could print to hand out at a booth.
>

I thoroughly agree with this. I know the material is available in the svn
but this is not the easiest environment for people to find the simple
things that they need. No doubt there's something on the wiki about the
different materials we have, but I think it would be useful to review this.
In the past, I've used Hubcast for cheap(ish) printing for conferences-
I've printed out the gatefold flier and the business cards using that
service, which IMHO are the best materials to hand out. I've also sourced a
quick and cheap printer of DVDs in the UK, and personally I think it's
definitely worth having a big pile of professional-looking dvds to give
out.


>
> 2- With my treasurer hat on:
>
> Dozens or hundreds of micro-payments is clearly a no-go given the current
> setup (unfortunately).
>
>
> Daniel
>
> Hopefully this is something we could work around- maybe pay each chapter
once a year or similar? (This will need working out)

Further thoughts- personally I think we need to cap the amount that we give
to a chapter, so that we are fair to everyone. Similarly I think we need to
define some sort of criteria for the relevance of a conference so that we
don't end up spending cash on events of dubious value to OSGeo. How we work
this out, I'm not sure, but I can imagine it becoming a free-for-all if we
don't!

Jo

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***Jo Cook*
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