Remember how the Drupal Association hosted a webinar and you asked for us to think through our strategy some more? Well, we did, with a lot of help from you. More details about that process can be found below, but the big news is that we are kicking off a series of community training webinars in August:

Registration will open soon..on our OWN webinar platform.

About Our Webinar Series Strategy And Approach

The webinar series will focus on three areas: Strengthening Community, Growing Drupal Adoption, and Educating the community via our partners’ pitch-free webinars.

How did we arrive at this content decision? We used several filters starting with the Drupal Association mission: To foster and support the Drupal software project, the Drupal community, and its growth. Naturally, whatever we create needs to support this mission. Then, the Drupal Association staff reviewed community feedback and looked at webinar content  that the Drupal community is already providing. In the end, we found our niche.

Defining our content focus

The Drupal Association posted a community survey  and we were happy to see a lot of feedback and support for the webinar program, which is no surprise since our community values learning. We are essentially a global sponge for Drupal knowledge!

The survey gauged topic preferences and there was a strong request for DrupalCon-esque content. However, the staff felt that we should stay away from this direction for now. We already have tons of this content in the Drupal Association Youtube channel, which we can clearly promote more, and our business community is hosting similar webinars already.

The survey also showed that there was interest in third party applications and tools that can help build even better Drupal sites. And, 80% of participants said they would attend a webinar presented by a partner or sponsor as long as it was pitch-free and purely educational. This is great news since our Premium Supporting Partners have great content to share. And, we are launching a Technology Partner Program soon and they, too, will have great insights on how to use their products and services for building Drupal sites.

Another popular topic that came up in the survey was around “Growing Community” - how to get involved in the Drupal community, how to grow community leadership skills, and where and how to access resources.

What Drupal Association Webinars Will Focus On

Based on all the feedback, we decided to have a three prong webinar content approach:

1. The “Strengthening Community” webinar series, which is for anyone in the community who is looking for resources to grow, support and be a leader in the Drupal community. The Drupal Association and other community members have tons of resources and pro-tips to share. And, we will invite community members who are successful in these areas to participate as co-presenters.

2. Pitch-free, educational content from Supporting Partners and Technology Partners, who have a lot of knowledge to share with the community. Supporting Partners are Drupal businesses who can present on their latest module, case study, etc. While Technology partners are software companies who provide third party integrations or tools (developer, analytics, project management, etc.).

3. A “Growing Drupal” webinar series. The Drupal Association can help with Drupal adoption in two areas:

  • Fostering our global sales force - Drupal businesses. The Drupal Association can foster a healthy and ever growing Drupal business community by providing educational content on business best practices around sales and marketing, talent recruitment, and other hot topics coming out of our DrupalCon CxO events. We will start this series on September 11. The speaker is Brad Power, Digital+Web Technology Coordinator, who selected Drupal for Whole Foods. He will explain his evaluation process and how to sell to someone like himself.

  • Raising awareness in the CMS Evaluator Marketplace. The Drupal Association staff and Marketing committee are creating a Drupal8 marketing campaign. One important tactic is targeting this audience with educational webinars. Not only will these webinars raise awareness of the Project, but there will be a strong call to action to connect with the Drupal business community to start their Drupal evaluation.

We’d like to thank the community for helping us find our niche in the world of Drupal webinars. We are very excited to launch this program and we encourage you to tell us what kind of topics you want to hear within these three series.