Behind the scenes at TDF: marketing and PR
Marketing and PR at TDF are a very demanding task, as we are covering the entire world from a single point in Europe. It is a challenging role, and also a very rewarding one (because we continue to increase the project visibility with each announcement, and this is a testament to the quality of the software).
During the last six months, we have worked at two major announcements: the finalization of LibreOffice 5.0 announcement, which has been a success under any point of view, and has raised the visibility of LibreOffice over the other free office suites, and the preparatory work for the announcement of LibreOffice 5.1, which will be finalized in early February 2016.
In between, we have had the Aarhus Conference – with a number of community related announcements – and the 1,000th developer joining the project since 2010, a significant achievement for a project which until 2010 was considered one of the most difficult to contribute to, because of the size and the characteristics of the source code.
In July, we prepared the announcement, planned for August 5, 2015. Apart from drafting the usual press release, we developed a “road to LibreOffice 5.0” text and visual to underline the importance of our time based release schedule, and the key features of every previous major release.
In addition, a couple of weeks before the announcement, we started poking top editors for a pre-release conference call, to provide additional information to the people interested in offering some insights. Conference calls were scheduled both the week before the announcement and on the Monday and Tuesday before our Wednesday, August 5, announcement.
We organized two group conference calls, and one publisher specific conference call. On the day of the announcement, LibreOffice 5.0 received a large coverage, with a corresponding spike in donations and downloads. All in all, the launch of LibreOffice 5.0 was the most successful ever.
In September, we supported the LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus with the traditional “state of the project” presentation, plus several community related announcements (sent as press releases after the end of the conference).
In October, it was business as usual, i.e. the usual flow of LibreOffice releases updating the LibreOffice 4.4 “still” branch and the LibreOffice 5.0 “fresh” family. Each new release confirmed the uptake of donations, which have increased since the announcement of LibreOffice 5.0. This is probably also due to the growth of the awareness, based on a large number of articles in the media.
In November, we have started planning the LibreOffice 5.1 announcement, scheduled for early February 2016. The challenge is to outperform what we have achieved with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.0, which was a success. In order to improve results, we have planned a number of actions starting from December, when the first Release Candidate will be available.
In addition, we plan to produce several documents to describe LibreOffice 5.1 to specific user clusters, such as enterprises and individual users (which represent the majority of our users). Later on, we will try to add a document targeted to schools, where LibreOffice is rather popular.
To reach a wider media audience, we have also started to add other journalists to our mailing lists, and to purge the existing mailing lists from outdated or wrong addresses.
We have a total of over 13,000 journalists in our global and local mailing lists, which are becoming more accurate after the distribution of each press release. All people covering LibreOffice are cherry picked and added to a specific mailing list, which is becoming the core of our press release distribution system.
Stay tuned, exciting marketing times ahead of us.