A Few Tips for Marketing Open Source Projects in the Non-Profit Sector
You need a strategy and a checklist to successfully market an open source project. This includes publishing code, defining marketing goals and inviting feedback.
Reimagining marketing as a force for genuine community engagement and empowerment is pretty important when dealing with open source projects in the non-profit tech sector. Marketing your open source projects definitely requires some careful planning and strategic execution that can be time-consuming, but it usually pays off in the end. Just like a pre-flight checklist can help a pilot ensure a smooth takeoff, a checklist can help streamline your efforts while maximising the impact of your project.
Licensing and Code Access
In the vast ecosystem of code hosted on platforms like GitHub, it may be surprising to note that more than half of the projects are unlicensed. While this oversight may seem insignificant at first, it can lead to default copyright laws restricting the usage and distribution of the code. As creators, it’s essential to understand the significance of retaining all rights to your source code so that no one may reproduce, distribute or create derivative works from your work.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) serves as the steward of the definition of open source. Their purpose is to endorse and approve software licences that adhere to the definition of open source. However, it is very easy to get overwhelmed by the extensive list of licences to choose from. There are many resources available to help you on your journey — just be sure you read more than a few articles to help you understand clearly why you’re choosing the licence that you do.
Accessibility and Community Engagement
A step that many people sometimes are hesitant to take, or sometimes overlook entirely, is making their code accessible to the public. Simply put, if people can’t access your code, they cannot contribute to your project.
Where you publish the code can also have a high impact on the amount of attention you can attract. Placing it in a high-traffic area such as GitHub or GitLab allows people who are already familiar with those workflows to engage with ease. Ultimately, wherever you publish it, ensure that potential contributors can engage in normal ways — communicate issues, make feature requests, or interact with it in a broader way. Doing so not only boosts visibility around your open source project, but can also help foster a sense of community that is strong within the world of open source.
Setting Clear Marketing Goals
You have a project, and its goal is probably very clear to you, but the goal of your marketing efforts will be different than the goal of your project. For example, are you looking to attract contributors, engage code reviewers, or simply expand your user base? Each of these goals will have overlapping tactics, but if you pick one and focus on that when making all your decisions, you will find that your effort is far more fruitful.
Feedback and Community Building
Publicising any project inevitably invites feedback and opens the door for diverse perspectives that can uncover blind spots, identify areas of improvement, and even validate the usefulness of your project efforts. Such a perspective is crucial to the success of the project, but the way feedback is given and received can greatly impact its effectiveness.
Guiding feedback using a contributor guide can help serve as a blueprint for fostering constructive feedback and collaboration within your project community. Define early how you want your users to provide feedback, and your contributors to send in pull requests, and then document those definitions! Make liberal use of templates for issues and pull requests and define your anticipated feedback timelines. If you get time to engage with your users only once a week, make sure that is stated (maybe even set up an auto-reply bot stating such) so that folks don’t feel ignored.
Building Awareness and Diversity
Building awareness around your project can come with a variety of marketable ideas and strategies to best present your efforts to the public. While word of mouth is one of the most tried and trusted ways to generate attention, the shift to social media and web presence has placed marketing emphasis elsewhere. Blogs, vlogs, and podcast appearances are excellent opportunities to not only showcase your project’s potential but to really dive deep into its history, the problems that it can solve, and the value it provides.
Building awareness can be enhanced by welcoming a diverse set of voices to your project. With any project that requires personal time and investment, it can be hard to open the doors to a variety of opinions, critiques, and alternate perspectives. But open source communities are colourful and vibrant ecosystems where diverse individuals come together to share ideas, drive innovation, and inspire each other. This is the time to check your ego at the door, ensure that YOU are a good community steward, and let the success of the project take the lead.
At the same time, though, it is still your project! Set realistic expectations and times for the people who do engage with you and be consistent in your application of the things you’ve designed. Failing to do so can breed a lack of trust and discourage earnest engagement with you and your team.
If you have done all this perfectly, then you have brought in users and contributors, been consistent in your engagement with those users, and have built trust with a growing community. You are using your platforms to discuss the things you would like to see expanded or the new and exciting ways your project is being used. Your code reviewers also use this space to highlight the problems within the project or with community engagement overall. Well done!
If you haven’t done this already, that’s okay too! I can’t think of a single project that has executed this perfectly ahead of time, and hasn’t hit some snags along the way. But, by slowing down, drawing up a detailed checklist and taking the time to do the leg work early in the process, you can avoid feeling left behind later.
