[Evangelism] report of the Plone Foundation booth at NTEN NTC conference in San Francisco

[Donna Snow]

Hi,

Congratulations on the great turnout! That's exciting to hear.

I help out at the Open Source Wold conference (formerly Linux World)
conference every year (I think I missed one year due to illness) I made
these same suggestions last year after our experience at Linux World.

Post 1:

http://snowwrites.com/2008/08/11/improving-the-visibility-of-plone/

Post2:

http://snowwrites.com/2008/08/13/plone-visibility-the-booth-kit-couple-pictures-of-plone-booth/


We may get a better "response" from attendees this year because I've noticed
an upsurge in interest and thanks to sixfeetup and jazkarta much more
exposure in general. As always count me in to help out at Open Source World.
I'd love to see much more interest in Plone in the Bay Area as I often feel
like I'm fighting alone out here trying to make people see just how awesome
Plone is.. even our python group is much more enamored with Django then
Plone.

Best Regards,
Donna M Snow, Principal
C Squared Enterprises
illuminating your path to Open Source
http://www.csquaredtech.com

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Nate Aune <natea at jazkarta.com> wrote:

> I'm just returning from attending the NTEN NTC conference
> (http://nten.org/ntc), the largest conference about non-profit
> technology in the US, which took place in San Francisco this year.
> This was the first time that the Plone Foundation had a booth at the
> exhibitor's "Science Fair" which took ran from 3pm-8pm on sunday. The
> foot traffic to the booth was much greater than anticipated, and there
> was a lot of interest in Plone from the 1,400 attendees of the
> conference.
>
> Many people came up and asked about Plone and how it compared to
> Drupal and Joomla. Luckily we had reprints of the Plone excerpt from
> the Idealware OSS CMS report to hand out to people, and the Idealware
> booth was right next to ours, so we could send them next door to
> inquire about the full 60 pg report.
> http://www.idealware.org/comparing_os_cms/
>
> We also had a lot of questions about Plone and Salesforce integration,
> as this is the holy grail for non-profits to have their CMS integrated
> with their CRM for donor management and tracking their constituents
> level of engagement with their organization. The only other vendors
> providing this level of integration are large commercial vendors such
> as Convio and Blackbaud who charge a minimum of $30,000 per year,
> which pretty much leaves the smaller non-profits turning to open
> source solutions such as Plone combined with the free Salesforce
> Nonprofit Starter Pack.
> http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/nonprofitstarterpack
>
> The booth had pretty much non-stop traffic for the 3-8pm hours of the
> expo. The 5 of us were plenty busy answering questions and showing
> demos of Plone+Salesforce integration on the 17" monitor, while we had
> screencasts rolling on the 23" Cinema display. We ran out of the 15
> Questions about Plone brochures
> (http://extranet.sixfeetup.com/Plone/top-15-questions-about-plone.pdf),
> and we gave out a lot of the little Plone stickers and bumper
> stickers. Thanks to Six Feet Up for printing them.
> http://www.sixfeetup.com/swag
>
> Lessons learned:
>
> 1) make some Plone+Salesforce screencasts and show them on the big
> screen. Chris ended up being a bottleneck because he could only show
> one person at a time on the little monitor.
>
> 2) make a brochure about "Plone for Nonprofits" which highlights NPOs
> that are using Plone, more info about the Salesforce integration. This
> provides a "take home" that they can show their boss. It's hard to
> capture a conversation and re-summarize it when you get back home.
>
> 3) Giving away the Practical Plone book was a good way to get people
> to drop their business cards into the glass bowl for a chance to win
> the free book.
>
> 4) Printing up a large format vinyl banner with grommets is not too
> expensive at Kinkos (around $100). Thanks to David Brenneman for
> taking care of this! (I only wish we had discovered the 25% off coupon
> on banners before we paid for it ;)
>
> Thanks to Jon Stahl, Chris Johnson, David Brenneman, Ross Patterson
> and Alexander Limi for helping out at the booth!  We're planning to
> apply for a Plone Foundation booth at the OpenSourceWorld dotorg
> pavilion that is taking place in August, also in San Francisco, so if
> you would like to help out with this, please let us know!
> http://www.opensourceworld.com
>
> Nate
>
> --
> Nate Aune - natea at jazkarta.com
> Sign up for Plone Developer training on the Amalfi Coast of Italy
> (5/11-12).
> http://plonedev-natesig.eventbrite.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Evangelism mailing list
> Evangelism at lists.plone.org
> http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
>
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