Author: Mike Saunders

In 2024, The Document Foundation and its global LibreOffice community undertook a variety of marketing initiatives aimed at increasing visibility, fostering community engagement, and driving adoption of LibreOffice

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 in Luxembourg

A major highlight of TDF’s 2024 marketing activities was the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference, held from October 10 to 12 in Luxembourg. The annual event brought together contributors from around the world, including developers, designers, documentation writers, translators, and marketers.

Marketing efforts for the conference included:

• A targeted social media campaign promoting the event’s location, speakers, and agenda.
• Outreach to local technology communities and universities in Luxembourg to boost participation.
• The creation of promotional graphics and materials highlighting the conference themes and goals.
• Live updates and content shared across LibreOffice’s social channels to engage a remote audience.

The conference acted as a vital showcase of LibreOffice’s progress, community strength, and future plans.

“Month of LibreOffice” Campaigns

Throughout May and November 2024, TDF organized its recurring “Month of LibreOffice” initiative. This campaign aimed to recognize and reward community contributors across various roles, including development, documentation, QA and marketing.

Participants who contributed during the campaign period were acknowledged through:

• Special edition badges awarded digitally.
• Public recognition via blog posts and social media.
• Incentives like stickers and merchandise shipped to selected contributors.

This initiative not only celebrated existing contributors but also attracted new participants interested in supporting open source software.

Launch of the LibreOffice Podcast Series

In November 2024, TDF launched its LibreOffice Podcast, a new platform to discuss topics related to LibreOffice and the wider world of open source software. The podcast aimed to:

• Share success stories from migrations to LibreOffice.
• Offer insights into FOSS marketing strategies.
• Feature interviews with developers and community leaders.
• Provide behind-the-scenes looks at the ongoing work within TDF.

The first episode focused on marketing strategies for FOSS, with discussions on how to engage institutions and governments in adopting LibreOffice.

Enhanced Social Media and Content Strategy

In 2024, TDF expanded and optimized its social media presence. Alongside its traditional platforms like Twitter (X) and Facebook, TDF increased its focus on:

• Mastodon: engaging the open-source community on federated social platforms.
• LinkedIn: Sharing professional success stories, including case studies on large-scale LibreOffice deployments.
• Regular posting of blog content, including release announcements, tutorials, and community spotlights.
• Short video clips and graphics to make content more accessible and visually engaging.

These efforts aimed to grow the project’s audience, particularly among decision-makers in public administration and enterprises.

Native Language Community Outreach

TDF placed a strong emphasis on supporting native language communities. The marketing team worked with volunteers worldwide to produce localized materials, including:

• Press releases for new LibreOffice versions.
• Social media templates and visual assets.
• Brochures explaining the benefits of LibreOffice in local contexts.

Several regions ran independent marketing initiatives, including:

• Nepal: workshops for students on using LibreOffice Writer to create professional resumes.
• India: local events demonstrating LibreOffice’s potential for government offices and educational institutions.

Workshops, Training and Community Events

Throughout the year, TDF organized workshops and training sessions aimed at onboarding new users and contributors. These included:

• Online training for translators and QA testers.
• Regional events offering hands-on experience with LibreOffice migrations.
• Webinars aimed at IT administrators exploring LibreOffice deployment in enterprise environments.

The Open Source Workshops helped public sector organizations understand the benefits of LibreOffice and how it can replace proprietary office suites.

Outreachy and Template Development

LibreOffice participated in the Outreachy program, with a focus on developing new templates for LibreOffice Writer. These templates included resumes, reports, and business documents aimed at improving the user experience and broadening appeal, particularly for users migrating from proprietary suites.

Marketing activities highlighted:

• How templates increase productivity.
• The contributions of new developers and designers participating in the Outreachy program.
• The availability of these templates through LibreOffice’s website and community channels.

Media and Press Relations

TDF continued its media relations work, distributing regular press releases covering:

• New LibreOffice releases and features.
• Major migrations by organizations and governments.
• Events such as LibreOffice Conference and Month of LibreOffice campaigns.

TDF’s press outreach focused on reinforcing LibreOffice’s position as a cost-effective, secure, and privacy-respecting alternative to proprietary office suites.

Download Statistics and User Adoption

The marketing efforts in 2024 yielded significant results:

• Download Milestone: by the end of 2024, LibreOffice surpassed 400 million cumulative downloads since its inception in 2011, with an average of 28.6 million downloads per year.
• Weekly Downloads: Weekly downloads approached 1 million, marking the highest figures since 2023.
• Public Sector Adoption: The German state of Schleswig-Holstein announced plans to migrate 30,000 PCs to LibreOffice, aiming for completion by 2026.

Conclusion

In 2024, through conferences, campaigns, podcasts, and media outreach, TDF advanced its mission of promoting free and open source software while making LibreOffice more accessible and trusted around the world. These marketing efforts not only amplified LibreOffice’s visibility but also demonstrated the value of community-driven open source projects in delivering professional-grade software solutions.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Our two main websites are vital sources of information for The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice software. We also use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

TDF website

The Document Foundation website provides general information about the foundation (overview, statutes, code of conduct, financials and reports) and its governance (board of directors, membership committee, members, advisory board, and engineering steering committee), and about LibreOffice certification, including a list of certified developers, and professionals for migrations and trainings.

During 2024, the foundation’s website was visited 98,499 times, with 146,456 page views – a slight reduction in visits but also a slight growth in page views from 2023. Continent-wise, the largest chunk of visits were from Europe (52%), followed by North America (24%) and Asia (16%). And regarding software: the most visits were from PCs using the Windows (65%) operating system, followed by GNU/Linux (10%) and macOS (8%) and devices uses Android (6.2%), while for browsers: Chrome had 39%, followed by Firefox (16%) and Microsoft Edge (15%).

LibreOffice website

The LibreOffice website provides information about the office suite and the document format, the various download options, how to get help, how to contribute to the project, events where users can get to know the LibreOffice community, and how to make a donation to support the project and the community.

In 2024, we continued to make improvements and tweaks to the website, updating the “Discover” and “New Features” sections of the site to reflect new versions of the software.

During 2024, the English-language LibreOffice website was visited 19,298,517 times (a 0.6% gain over 2023), with 46,065,236 page views (a 0.1% gain). Most visits were from Europe (52%), followed by Asia (20%), North America (15%) and South America (9%), from PCs using the Windows operating system (82%), followed by macOS (6%) and Linux (23%). Regarding web browsers, Chrome was the most popular (41%), followed by Microsoft Edge (29%) and Firefox (13%).

Blogs

TDF’s blogs (like this one) are essential for communicating activities inside and around the project, including new releases of LibreOffice, community events and support for other free and open source initiatives. In 2024, we used them to post regular interviews with community members and provide updates from team members about documentation, marketing, QA, design and more.

Blogs were also maintained by various native language communities including Japanese, Spanish, German and others. Thanks to the hard work of community members, we had press releases, tips and other articles translated into many languages, and picked up by local media organisations.

These native language blogs complement the information provided by the main blog in English, and by the two blogs managed by members of the design and the quality assurance projects, which provide updates about activities for the upcoming major releases.
In 2024, the blog had 100,180 visits and 131,174 page views – a drop in both cases of around 30% from the previous year. The press releases for LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8 were the most popular posts, followed by the posts about the German state of Schleswig-Holstein moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice.

Social media

In January 2024, our X (formerly known as Twitter) account (@LibreOffice) had 63,060 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 68,870. Our most popular posts were for major releases of LibreOffice, and news about migrations to the suite. We posted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.

In addition, we focused not only on our own posts, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice community members. We liked and reposted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we reposted popular older tweets, and responded to individual messages.

On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2024 we worked more on expanding our activities on our account @libreoffice@fosstodon.org, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 25,440 to 29,326. We also joined Bluesky in late 2023 thanks to invites from a community member, and by December 2024 our follower count had reached 2,900.

Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 63,348 page followers to 64,239. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards other social media platforms. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.

YouTube channel

Our YouTube channel grew from 20,638 subscribers and 3,243,107 video views in January 2024 to 22,586 subscribers and 3,534,370 video views by the end of the year. The most popular videos were the “New Features” videos for LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8, and we also added videos of talks, presentations and workshops from the LibreOffice Conference 2024.

At the end of 2024, we posted the first video from the new LibreOffice Podcast series, where Italo Vignoli and Mike Saunders from TDF talked about the challenges and opportunities in marketing free and open source software like LibreOffice. More podcasts are planned for 2025.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!