Discussion on:

Market your project to build enthusiasm

Unfortunately, in the midst of a project, the marketing of the project is the first thing forgotten, and I have been guilty of this more times than not. The times I have done it successfully, though, just reinforces the benefit.

Many people viewing "marketing" as a suspect activity, but I would define it as communications with previously unidentified stakeholders and people of influence. Successful projects or products are often at risk, because decision makers often only hear of problems. If a project is quietly successful, keeping its users happy over time, it runs the risk of escaping management attention. This makes it much more difficult to request additional resources (time, money, manpower) and if difficult decisions must be made by management, the project no one has heard of is at greatest risk.

One of the first projects I worked on, a small 10 person effort, produced a small patch. I was quite surprised at the reaction to what we had envisioned as a goodie for the development team. Senior management started to stop by to get patches and for at least a week, we would see senior managers with a patch paperclipped to their suit jackets.

In projects "flying under the radar" is not the best long-term approach. A marketing program can provide increased awareness of your project beyond the channels normally conatined in a communications plan.

A comment that you commonly hear about successful organizations is that "they stay on message".

We've learned that our employees actually placed their knowledge of our organization's direction slightly ahead of information about career advancement opportunities, but both were at the top of the list of messages they wanted to hear.

I agree with Wayne M.'s comment that marketing should not be a suspect activity, but an essential part of being accountable to stakeholders. His tip about the "patches" and those of the original author, Tom Mochal, are great attention-getters, and help create compelling, interesting media vehicles to carry messages.

Our latest Communication Plan knitted its objectives into our Strategic Business Plan, to support specific business objectives and to assign accountability for marketing communications to stakeholders. A successful organization knows its key messages and stays on them.

Thanks for this thought-provoking and useful post.

Yes, I agree it is very underrated. Previous experience on a large roll-out, we had a 3 month promotion plan running up to go-live and then freebies to give away during roll-out.

We created newsletters and presentations of the positive points of the upgrade. Once a month we would send a presentation out via email giving the users a taster of what was to come. People were really interested and became quite positive to the whole project.

We created a name and logo for the project which was used in all publications. So anything we sent out, users could immediately see that it was information regarding the upgrade.

We also got our top honcho to send out an email in support of the project and encouraging users to go on training.

During the training we gave out freebies including an "I need help" sign which users were informed that if they placed this on top of their PC, IT will immediately know who requires help whilst floor walking, which reduced the pressure of support calls and controlled the approach of floor walking.

I think all of this contributed to a high rate of users attending training and also the general positive attitude during the roll-out. This also helped from a support point of view as users were generally quite patient as they were kept informed during the run up and roll-out.

Although, of course, this all depends on budget but if there is any budget spare then it is worth investing.

Marketing tip? If you are marketing locally, make sure to have your local numbers, addresses, etc. displayed prominently in your ad.