Increase TYPO3 Association memberships in the United States

TYPO3 Association Budget 2022
1

Application by
Paul Hansen

What is your idea about?
The United States is a huge CMS market where TYPO3 currently has a relatively small presence. We need to turn that around at the grassroots level by getting existing TYPO3 users on our community’s radar — by becoming Association members.

Association memberships are an important metric of TYPO3’s overall health. Organizations and individuals that join are engaged with the TYPO3 community and recognize the value of giving back to the software they depend on. Through the most cost-effective means possible — primarily direct outreach and networking — this project will encourage and facilitate memberships of U.S.-based organizations, businesses, and individuals.

What is the potential impact of your idea?
The focus of this project is to grow TYPO3 Association memberships from the United States. Currently, there are only a handful of members based in the U.S. Of course, there are many more TYPO3 users than that — but they haven’t joined the Association, presumably because they don’t understand the value that membership would provide to them. By contacting these users directly, we will encourage them to join, and work to solve any concerns that they have about becoming members. Of course, our goal isn’t just get them to join the Association; we want to onboard new community members who will help bootstrap TYPO3 growth in the country.

What we learn from this process will be communicated with the membership team to close the loop on making overall improvements to the program. Although the initial numbers are anticipated to be small, we’ll also do what we can in terms of outreach through typo3.org so that U.S.-based organizations and companies can see that their peers are using TYPO3.

In addition to the primary goal, we want to facilitate forming the kernel of a TYPO3 User Group in the U.S. (to later spin off into multiple local User Groups). It is hoped that this batch of new Association members will form the starting point for such a group.

Who can / should implement your idea?
I will take care myself

Approximate Funds needed
below €5,000

2

Isn’t that exactly what the marketing team should do? I hear so little about this team to reach out to other countries

3

Hi Paul,
can you estimate how the funds be primarily spend – expenses, effort/working hrs, etc.?
When thinking about expenses it might be possible to win a sponsor.
thx, Daniel

4

Just jumping in there: The topic of international outreach has been on our agenda for quite a while, but the goals for the last years have been changed several times from the board and the GmbH, hence why we weren’t able to go forward with this topic.

For this year however, the board and the GmbH agreed on marketing and communication goals, which also include direct outreach to North America. Paul brought his idea up in the Marketing Team and we will support him in his efforts.

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5

Thanx for the clarification.

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Thank you, Luisa for saying how important this initiative is for TYPO3. I’ve served on the TYPO3 Marketing Team since 2020. The team will definitely contribute to this project’s success by providing data, resources, and ideas.

The funding for my proposed project is specifically to invest time in direct networking as a “local” in order to convert TYPO3 users into T3A members. I’ll be taking time away from running my busy agency, but I’m eager to make this effort because we’ve got to turn the membership situation around!

@dfau We are really starting from almost zero in the US when it comes to T3A membership and TYPO3 usage in general, especially when you consider that the US has the third-highest population in the world. Most of the time will be direct networking and community building, all driven by the goal of gaining and retaining new T3A members. I would love to see some sponsorships if we are able to build enough of a group. My sense is that sponsorship-worthy events will be more of a 2023 thing.

I’m not sure why, but a portion of my budget application was omitted from the original post here. It would have answered some of these questions. I have included that below.

Additional Comments to Funds needed:

This is a lightweight, limited-scope project. While the United States is a large country, existing TYPO3 usage is relatively low. The project budget is scaled to that actual user base rather than the potential one. It is great to imagine future growth, but we don’t need to over-engineer it right now.

Instead of advertising, the focus will be on contacting individuals directly. It is friendly, easy, and highly effective to simply call people. We’ll use networking to expand our reach, such as a university contacting other universities that use TYPO3. We’re rebuilding the TYPO3 community in the U.S., so this personal contact is crucial. As the owner of a U.S.-based agency specializing in TYPO3, I’m in a good position to lead this effort.

As part of this project, we want to run a small one-day virtual event, later in the year. The event will provide a good focal point for getting the new user group going. An invitation to attend is also good reason for following up with people.

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