We created new materials to help decision makers—and those who sell to or need to inform them—understand what makes TYPO3 CMS so brilliant in terms relevant to them. Check out the new pages!
This contribution event is part of ongoing efforts to provide TYPO3’s professional community with better sales enablement materials. We’d like everyone to be able to clearly communicate our strengths and differentiators, where we fit in the market, and how TYPO3 can deliver value to potential clients and customers. Our aim is to grow adoption and our community of developers, marketers, and business leaders.
When we started our work with TYPO3 CMS and its community, we saw that a number of features the industry was talking about weren’t mentioned in the TYPO3 communication materials, or were described only for a deeply technical audience. This inspired us to carry out an extensive analysis of TYPO3 and its competitors, cataloging and comparing an inventory of more than 600 features in what we call a “Value Map.”
Weaving that data into a targeted story on a set of landing pages was the goal (and the result!) of the sprint.
The essence of the story we want to tell about TYPO3 CMS is now captured in the benefit statement on typo3.org/cms:
TYPO3 delivers blazingly fast, flexible websites powered by an enterprise open-source CMS. Backed by a vibrant professional community and commercial ecosystem, use TYPO3 to connect to your customers and compete in today’s landscape with the richest digital experiences.
If the reader wants to learn more, she can click through to typo3.org/cms/features, where she can read benefit statements about seven categories we created to describe and position TYPO3. Each category is made up of important facts and feature areas that are, in turn, described on a landing page of their own. Our categories and their landing pages:
From typo3.org/cms to typo3.org/cms/features to each category landing page, you go from least to most detail. A business or technical leader can come into typo3.org/cms page and get a strategic view, read as far as they want and come away with an understanding of the essence of TYPO3 and the value it delivers. Those wanting to dive deeper—for example, if they need to inform business leaders about the suitability of TYPO3 as an enterprise open source CMS-choice—can read the much more detailed category landing pages. Developers and the highly technical can and should, of course, inform themselves at the deepest levels through TYPO3’s exhaustive documentation and other online resources.
To convert 600+ CMS features into tight, structured, clear communication and publish them on 9 web pages in 2.5 days, you need smart contributors, and well-prepared, well-structured tasks and workflows … and coffee. We wanted to finish this sprint with completed, published pages, and so we came in with a focus.
The more preparation you do before a contribution sprint, the better your outcomes will be. By having tasks queued up and ready, we freed precious time for contribution during the event. When our fellow contributors arrived, we had tasks up in Jira, collaborative documents created, and research and analysis available to work with.
We started by getting everyone ready to work on their tasks. Our two designers started working on the three page-designs we needed, while everyone else focused on writing up parts of our seven main feature areas of TYPO3 CMS. We broke down benefits, pain points, and solutions around each to create convincing materials for decision makers. Most importantly, everything we wrote at the sprint was also based on a detailed analysis of TYPO3 CMS features compared with market research to focus on the most valuable messages that matter to potential clients today.
Contributors came from Switzerland, Norway, the UK, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. Everyone had a background in working in TYPO3, but not everyone had developer experience. As Luisa Faßbender said, in her blog post about the event: “I find it particularly nice that I can contribute to the TYPO3 community even as a non-techie - Contribution is much more than just code.” Check out some video highlights of the sprint.
Remote Contributors:
Thanks to the support of the TYPO3 Association, everyone got accommodation, dinners, and lunches. We were able to stay together and hang out in a hotel located close to Venlo station. Thank you to TYPO3 GmbH for the content planning resources. And a special, huge thank you to Esther Natar for coordinating this event in her hometown and setting us all up for success.
There is so much more than code when it comes to contributing to open source. Your contributions to marketing efforts, for example, can make a big impact if they help drive new adoption of TYPO3 CMS. Marketing Sprint contributor Carlos Llanos recently wrote about the importance of marketing contributions in open source. He pointed out that the responsibility for CMS decision-making has changed from IT departments to Marketing. One consequence of this shift is that we need to give business decision makers better resources to learn about TYPO3. In contrast to our historical taste for communicating technical, developer-focused information, we need to communicate the value of TYPO3 in terms of business benefits.
There’s so much more to be told! We need your help. Create related content, publish on your own site. Your real-life examples will support the claims and give decision makers more evidence and practical information. Link back to these new feature landing pages to provide readers with further information about TYPO3 CMS.
Some ideas for marketing contributions:
To be part of the fun, get some help or inspiration, join us in the marketing channel on Slack. Here’s how to get a Slack account and how to use Slack in the TYPO3 Community.
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