Love LibreOffice? Want to let more people know about it? An effective (and easy) way is to add a mention of the software to your email signature. This is the piece of text that’s automatically added to emails that you send, and typically includes some information about your job, or other contact details.
Many people also use their email signatures (aka “sigs”) to spread the word about causes they support – such as free and open source software projects. So, you could use your signature to raise awareness about LibreOffice, for instance! When people read your emails, if they also check out the signature, they’ll learn something. For instance, you could add:
LibreOffice – free and open source office suite: https://www.libreoffice.org
Respects your privacy, and gives you back control over your data
What exactly you add is up to you, and depends on what you want to focus on. For instance, if you exchange emails with a lot of Microsoft Office users, you may want to mention that LibreOffice can work with .doc(x), .xls(x) files etc. Or perhaps you’re more focused on the ethics of free (as in freedom) software – and want to talk about the benefits to society it brings.
In any case, it’s best to keep it short (a couple of lines), and include a link so that readers can get more information. If the main LibreOffice website is too long for your sig, you can use https://tdf.io/lo as an alternative.
So, good luck, and if you have suggestions/ideas for signatures, post them in the comments below! Here are also some quick instructions for changing signatures in a few email clients and services…
Mozilla Thunderbird
Go to Tools > Account Settings in the menu, then choose your account, and scroll down to the “Signature text” box.
Google Mail (web view)
Click the Settings cog in the top-right, then “See all settings”. Under the General tab, scroll down to Signature, then click “Create new”. Give it a name and text, and underneath assign it to new emails in the “Signature defaults” option. Finally, scroll down and click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page.
Google Mail (mobile app)
Tap the three-line “hamburger” menu in the top-left and go to Settings. Tap your account, then scroll down to “Mobile signature”.
ProtonMail
Click Settings at the top, and go to Account in the left-hand menu. Under Identity, you’ll see a box to enter signature text.
Outlook (web view)
At the top of the browser window there is a “gear wheel” icon to access the settings. Click on this and a panel opens on the right-hand side. At the bottom of this panel is a link labelled “View All Outlook settings” – click on this. A new panel consisting of three columns appears. Click on the second item in the second column, labelled “Compose and reply”. This opens one further panel including the option to set the signature text, the font attributes and to insert a graphic if required.
Apple Mail
Go to Mail > Settings, then click the “Signatures” tab. In the middle row, choose the signature text to edit, and edit the text shown in the right row. You may also add a new signature text using the “+” button at the bottom of the middle row. If you did so then choose the mail account at the left row and select the new signature texts name at the bottom of the window. So you may toggle easily between different signatures.
Got instructions for other email clients/services? Let us know in the comments – thanks!
Do you work in a school, college or university? Perhaps you’re involved in local community events, and want to help spread the word about LibreOffice? Or maybe you work at a local library or non-profit that could benefit from learning about free and open source software. Well, we have some of these magazines to give away:
Discover LibreOffice is a complete guide to the suite, with extra articles about OpenDocument, migrations, the community and more. Much of the content was written by members of the LibreOffice community. There’s also an accompanying DVD with LibreOffice 6.1 – which is a slightly older version, but the disc may be useful in some places without regular internet access.
We’d like to get these into the hands of students and local communities as mentioned, so if you could help to distribute them, please drop us a line! Let us know:
Where you are
Who you plan to give them to
How many copies you need
And we’ll get back in touch. Note: this is not a giveaway of free copies for personal use. If you want a copy for yourself, check out the publisher’s shop for the latest version.
From the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice:
Dear fellow Community members,
Time has now come to decide how to proceed with some of the proposed changes taken from the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 with the regards of the 7.0 release, due in some weeks.
We really appreciated ideas and thoughts coming from our Community and we want to thank everyone who actively participated in the discussion, providing different points of views and sharing different scenarios, and proving themselves as passionate and caring members of the Community. Many contributions found on the board-discuss mailing list and/or via other channels are thoughtful, interesting and worthy of a much more profound discussion, in the common effort to overcome the challenge we have at hand: providing even better sustainability to the Project and its Community.
All those ideas, objections and insights will require more time to digest, merge and distill than the short time that separates us from the 7.0 release, the major release for the 10th anniversary of our beloved project, LibreOffice.
As such, the Board of Directors decided that the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 has to undergo further investigations and refinements, that we hope to carry on with the support of Community members, with the goal of implementing in a future release some clear, discussed and agreed changes on branding and Marketing that will help improving the sustainability of the project without lessening or hindering the role of LibreOffice and its Community inside the free software panorama.
Because of the importance of the topic at hand and the need of a worthy and compelling discussion with the Community, we will provide a time plan in a few days as well as some guidelines, with the goal of streamlining the process and coming to some good conclusions in a quick and effective way.
As such, the 7.0 release of LibreOffice will not see any of the tagline/flavor text proposed inside the release candidate (RC) versions, the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 or any of the alternatives proposed during the discussion, specifically inside the splash-screen, the start center and the about box; to explain it with other words, the modifications put in the RC versions with the regards of branding will be reverted to a previous state, so there will be seamless continuity from the 6.4 version to the 7.0.
As stated before, none of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.
Yet again, we renew our encouragement to contribute actively in the discussion about the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 in the next weeks, to allow for a more effective branding/Marketing ideas for the LibreOffice product and sustainability of its Community.
LibreOffice is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you, our worldwide amazing Community and all of its members, no matter their profession or background. Thank you truly, to all of you, for the passion, energy and creativity you put into this joint and thriving project. We’re looking forward to the next ten years to come!
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)
Ongoing Marketing Activities
Marketing at The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is a large team effort, with contractors paid for their activity – thanks to the money made available by our generous donors – and several volunteers, carrying out actions both at global and local levels to increase visibility and brand awareness.
One of the main ongoing projects has been the improvement of the donation page, with several test of page design and wording and of suggested donation amounts. In addition, statistics have been monitored on a daily basis, to trigger a quick reaction to negative fluctuations. As a result, the unexpected low number of donations in February 2019 was counterbalanced by the positive numbers of the following months.
Another ongoing project has been the Community Member Monday Series, with a weekly interview to one or more community members about their contributions to the project, especially within their native language community. Looking at the interviews, it’s rather easy to realize how diverse and geographically spread are the contributors to the LibreOffice project.
The marketing team created a series of New Features videos for the announcement of LibreOffice 6.3 and LibreOffice 6.4, covering the suite as a whole and Writer, Calc and Impress in detail. These videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users and are often embedded by news websites. They have also been translated in different languages by volunteers of the localization community. Here’s the 6.3 video:
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And 6.4:
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Activities Month by Month
In January, digital currencies support for donations – which was limited to Bitcoin – was extended via CoinGate to other currencies, including: Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, Nano, Telcoin, Zcash, XRP (Ripple), Augur, Stellar and Decred.
In late January, many LibreOffice contributors and the entire team at The Document Foundation travelled to Brussels for internal meetings and a hackfest, and then to attend FOSDEM, the largest FOSS meeting in Europe, at Université Libre de Bruxelles.
During FOSDEM, we had the opportunity to meet LibreOffice advocates in front of our booth in the main hall of building K where most of the largest projects are based, and at the Open Document Editors devroom. We also had a social dinner at ICAB, where the Italian community cooked pasta for our guests from various FOSS communities.
In early February, we announced LibreOffice 6.2, focusing on social media outreach to support the distribution of the usual announcement in several languages to global media lists. We followed the evolution of journalists, who are increasingly looking at social media as a source of news.
In February we also announced the dates of the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria (Spain) and those of the First LibreOffice Asia Conference in Tokyo.
In March, we started working on TDF’s Annual Report, creating most of the content and illustrations with LibreOffice, and collecting images from community events for the final version. The final booklet is entirely produced with free software (LibreOffice plus GIMP for tweaking images, Scribus for creating the layout, and the free Croscore fonts: Carlito and Caladea).
On March 15, MITRE announced that The Document Foundation was approved as CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a reference list of public cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with entries that describe those vulnerabilities and provide references for them.
During the month, we also announced the start of Google Summer of Code activities, we launched the call for papers for LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria (Spain), and we celebrated the Document Freedom Day. Finally, we started posting regular updates on Mastodon, an open source, self-hosted and federated social media platform.
In April, we announced the first Latin America LibreOffice Conference at the Facultad Politécnica de la Universidad Nactional de Assunción (FPUNA) in Asunción, Paraguay, on July 19 and 20.
In May, Mike Saunders organized the “Month of LibreOffice” campaign, which gave contributors the opportunity to thank other members of the community for their work by awarding them stickers and mugs. There have been awesome contributions all across the project, from code patches and bug report confirmations, through to translations and user support, with the award of 355 stickers and 12 glass mugs.
Members of the German LibreOffice community met at Linux Hotel in Essen for a weekend of discussions, ideas, hacking – and great food! The project also announced Adfinis SyGroup as a new member of TDF Advisory Board, and LibreOffice participating in Google Season of Docs to give technical writers and FOSS projects an opportunity to co-operate and better know each other.
In June, we started to concentrate on the announcement of LibreOffice 6.3, cleaning journalist mailings and starting to collect information for the press pack. Over time, we have also increased TDF and LibreOffice presence on social media, by incrementing the number of tweets and posts.
Meanwhile, we announced a cool new website, What Can I Do For LibreOffice, which shows people several ways to contribute to our project and community in a friendly and appealing way, encouraging newcomers to jump on board.
In July, we announced COSM, the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers, to hold funds and to retain editors to work at the ODF Technical Committee, to accelerate the development of ODF 1.3. ODF (Open Document Format) is the native file format of LibreOffice, and is a fully open standard document format, ideal for long-term content storage and sharing.
We also finalized the launch materials for LibreOffice 6.3, with the press kit localized in several languages, thanks to volunteers who contributed the translation in their own language, and the slide deck for press briefings.
At the end of the month, TDF announced that the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has joined the project’s Advisory Board. Back in 2014, the UK Cabinet Office announced the selection of the Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing and viewing government documents, so they are one of the main advocates of the standard.
In August, we announced LibreOffice 6.3, with better performance, many new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats. In Europe, members of the German LibreOffice community attended FrOSCon, one of the largest FOSS events in the country.
We started a new marketing campaign highlighting the fact that LibreOffice has no forced registration, subscriptions, payments or vendor lock-in, to underline the difference with the increasing number of software vendors asking for online subscription models.
In September, the community attended the LibreOffice Conference organized by the Spanish community at the University of Almeria, with sessions about development and other topics, and several workshops and meetings. Additional events, like the welcome drinks, the social dinner and the hacknight were hosted in different locations.
In October, The Document Foundation supported the International Day Against DRM 2019, to fight against the technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. Later in the month we started the announcement process for LibreOffice 6.4 with the first Bug Hunting Session.
In November, the TC Committee Draft of ODF Version 1.3 was released to OASIS for ratification. At the end of the review process, ODF Version 1.3 will be submitted to ISO for the final approval, which is expected in late 2020 or early 2021. During the month, LibreOffice was also present at two events in the Czech Republic, LinuxDays in Prague and OpenAlt in Brno. Of course, November was another “Month of LibreOffice”, with Mike Saunders awarding 304 stickers and 10 glass mugs to top contributors.
In December we announced the winner of the LibreOffice 10/20 Logo Community Contest. The year 2020 will be the 20th anniversary of the free office suite and the 10th anniversary of LibreOffice (announced on September 28, 2010). To celebrate, we have a special logo for presentations, events and swag.
The Importance of Donations
Donations are key for current operations and future developments of The Document Foundation, as they allow to keep the organization alive, to fund specific activities, to support events and other marketing tasks organized by native language projects, and to maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice.
Donations are also used to fund local projects such as OSCAL in Albania, LibreOffice Conferences in Asia and Latin America, LibreItalia Conference in Italy, FOSS events in Czech Republic, hackfests in France, activities targeted to schools in Italy, local events in the US, Japan and Turkey, and much more.
In addition, funds from donations have been used to reimburse travel expenses for many community members who have attended events to present LibreOffice and share their knowledge about the project.
If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!
Yes, our Twitter account now has over 30,000 followers. A big thanks to everyone in the community for supporting us, sharing and liking our tweets, and helping to spread the word about LibreOffice and free software!
Of course, we understand that not everyone wants to use Twitter, so we’re active on other platforms as well. For instance, our Mastodon account has 3,400 followers and gaining more every week. Check it out!
