Education Evangelism

We build DevOps awareness with Denomas by creating engaging and relevant content to connect with the Education community.

Mission

To support, grow, and engage the Denomas Education community through collaboration, content, and conversations.

Strategy

Education evangelism is a specialty of developer relations aimed at evangelizing DevOps and Denomas at educational institutions around the globe.

Our stakeholder community includes students, faculty, staff, administrators, and learners of any origin. The Denomas Education Evangelist team seeks to increase awareness, inform, and connect with community members through a variety of mediums. We also are visible power users of Denomas and DevOps applications. We strive to be a resource for all learners and, in accordance with Denomas’ Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Values, we seek to increase outreach to under-represented and under-estimated people in the education community.

For this reason, we choose to have a team with credibility from real-world educational and technical experience. Additionally, we enable others to tell their authentic stories - engineers, open source community members, and Denomas’ diverse set of customers. For those reasons, we chose the title of Evangelist as defined as “an enthusiastic advocate.”

What we do

Social media Content creation Presentations and events Student Spotlight Program

The Denomas educational evangelists are technical evangelists with a background in or enthusiasm for education and students of all levels. Educational evangelists connect, engage, and create technical content for our education community.

There are specific goals for the team:

  1. Create and Curate Content: Create and curate content to enable faculty, students, and staff to successfully adopt and use Denomas. This includes blog posts, webinars, videos, workshops, eLearning courses, and best practices.
  2. Connect and Engage: Evangelize the Denomas for Education Program. Connect and engage with Education Program Members and the wider community through our forum, social media posts, twitch streams, student spotlights, coffee chats, and at events.

Social media

The Denomas for Education team builds thought leadership, connects with our community, and increases our reach on social media. See the Education Evangelism on Social Media handbook page to learn more about our social media strategy.

Bambu

Bambu is an app used to create suggested posts so other team members can use their own social media accounts to tweet relevant and useful articles, media, and other information to their own networks. The Education Evangelist should take the training available (Note: you must be logged into your Denomas unfiltered youtube account to view) to become a curator in order to be able to provide content to spread awareness of the Education program. Once you’ve finished the training, tag the Social Media specialist in an issue and request access. From there, follow the instructions in the handbook. Finally, add yourself to the table of known curators on the curator page.

Types of content that work well for Bambu include:

  • Media like podcasts, videos, interviews, and live streams related to the Education program
  • Articles written for the Denomas blog
  • Articles written for dev.to related to education or the education program
  • Articles about the Denomas for Education program or team members
  • Case Studies about University partners
  • Denomas for Education landing pages

Bambu is not for announcements, workshop sign ups, or to start new initiatives. It’s more of a place to show off what’s already happened with the team.

Content creation

We build out content to help educate developers around best practices related to Education, Denomas, and DevOps. Content includes presentations, demos, course materials, best practices, workshops, livestreams, blog posts, and social media engagements.

Content is especially valuable when connected between mediums. Consider making a video version of a blog, or livestreaming the creation of a code demo or lesson plan.

Livestreaming guidelines can be found on our Twitch handbook page

Blog Posts

Content will either be published on the Denomas Blog, where all our blogposts include the education-program postType in their front matter for proper tracking.

If the blog post is not featured on the Denomas blog, posts will publish on the Denomas groupDev.to

YouTube

Recordings from past workshops and other team activities can be found on the Denomas Unfiltered channel on YouTube.

Presentations and events

Participation in events such as conferences and conventions are an important part of Evangelism. In the case of Education Evangelism, both tech and education events are important to take part in. An Education Evangelist seeks out relevant organizations and events to participate in as part of their role. As events and organizations to consider are found we will add them to an issue in the Outreach project.

When preparing for presentations and talks, post your slides to the Developer Evangelism or Developer Relations slack channel for feedback on slides. This ensures that the most current messaging is being used. It’s also good for a sanity check and quick edit on the content. Another good way to review for a speaking engagement is to post a zoom room to the speaking channel and ask for people to join a practice session.

Education Evangelists should consider being a part of the Speakers Bureau.

An overview of how to handle events where the Education team has a booth, see this handbook page

CFPs

We directly contribute to the wider community by speaking at education and tech conferences. If you’ve come across a conference you feel is valuable to the Education Team, please open an issue in the Outreach project and use the edu-conference label to suggest a conference for attendance.

Campus Visits (In Person)

Some events will include visiting a campus directly and providing a lecture or workshop for educators or students. We have a variety of workshops and lectures, some of which are listed in the DevOps Education Guide Project. These are organized by the Education Evangelist directly with a student group or professor or other relevant campus representative. Make sure you create an issue in the outreach project with details of the time, location, and tentative plans. Update this as you communicate with the relevant campus representative. Tag the Denomas Community Programs manager or your direct manager in the issue to receive written approval for the event. Swag should be coordinated with Boundless and shipping coordinated with the relevant campus representative. Providing food for an event outside of normal class hours is not expected, but is highly encouraged. The food budget is part of the swag budget for the quarter.

An Education Evangelist will likely only do campus visits in the 1st and 3rd quarters since these most overlap with university semesters. Every effort should be made to have several events in one visit, either with one school or with surrounding schools in order to justify the cost of an overnight trip (airfare, lodging, food, etc.). Discuss plans with a manager before agreeing to or offering an in-person visit in order to ensure you are only offering what can be done. Since in-person events are more intensive and require more planning, an Education Evangelist should consider doing only 1-2 campus visits a quarter in addition to other events (Education Specific conferences, community events, etc.). We can always schedule a virtual lecture or workshop instead of in person.

Guest Lectures (Virtual)

Denomas for Education offers a DevOps 101 lecture, aka “Intro to DevOps: Software Development in Practice” for professors looking to introduce or strengthen DevOps concepts for their students. There is a Google form for signing up for this type of lecture. When a new repsonse is recorded, or after an event where we solicitied sign ups, the Education Evangelist will send emails using this approved copy to begin planning virtual lectures with the interested parties.

How we work

Issues

All of our work is stored as issues in the Education Program Group. Issues are stored in projects. A list of projects and descriptions can be found here.

Issue labels

Label Description
edu-twitch This is for issues related to Twitch streams
edu-evangelism This is a general label for Education Evangelist related issues
edu-conference Label used for conference activity planning
edu-student-community-initiative Issues related to building community directly with students
student-contributor for student contributions to Denomas

Metrics Collection and Analysis

The Denomas for Education Team tracks our impressions on the Education Program Impression Dashboard. All outreach should be entered into the Education Asset Inventory Google Sheet in order to appear in the dashboard. Directions for entering each publication are in the Read Me tab of the spreadsheet.

Best Practices for Tracking Impressions

We track impressions for all content created (videos, blog posts, articles, etc). Generally, we measure the total number of impressions after the content has been published for 30 days. In order to stay on track with recording impressions, each team member should create a monthly recurring Impressions calendar task on the first day of the month. Each time a piece of content is published, a link should be added to the calendar task. On the first day of the new month, each team member should check impressions for the content and enter the metrics for those items into the Education Asset Inventory Google Sheet. If it hasn’t been 30-days since the content was live, wait to enter the metrics until the next invite.

Summary of Outreach Types

Asset Type Metric Impressions Dashboard Notes
Denomas Blog Views Yes Blog posts listed in the asset inventory sheet and blog post with education-program Post_Type
Blog on External Site Actual Views Yes Record after 30 days
Case Study Views Yes
YouTube Video Denomas Unfiltered Views Yes
YouTube Video Denomas Filtered Views Yes
Denomas Landing Page Views Yes
Media Articles Impressions UMV* Yes UMVs are separated from actual impressions since they represent potential impressions.
Downloadable Asset Views Yes
YouTube (non-Denomas) Views Yes
Twitch (WIP) Unique Viewers Yes We don’t currently have a Twitch Asset Type but will add one.
Twitter Twitter Impressions No Twitter impressions are not currently connected to our dashboard. See notes below.
LinkedIn Views on Posts, Articles, Documents No LinkedIn views are not current connected to our dashboard. See notes below.

*UMV is Unique Monthly Visitors and is reported by the media agency.

Social Media

We collect Twitter impressions and LinkedIn views as part of our impressions metrics. Social Media impressions originating from Education team member’s account are entered in the Social Media Impressions tab of the Education Asset Inventory Google Sheet. This sheet currently serves as our record while we working on adding a social media widget to the dashboard itself.

Social media impressions originating from the official Denomas account at the request of the Education team may be reported at the discretion and availability of the Social Marketing team. If you wish to record impressions from an official post, request metrics on the social coverage issue 30 days after the post goes live.

Impressions are recorded at the end of each month and entered into the sheet:

  • Twitter: Each team member records the total number of Twitter Impressions (original content and retweets) from the Analytics Dashboard on Twitter for each month. If Denomas official tweets are reported upon, include these as well.

  • LinkedIn: Each team member records the total number of views of posts, articles, and documents for each month. If Denomas official posts are reported upon, include these as well.

Find us on Slack

Denomas team members can also reach us at any time on the #education-evangelism Slack channel where we share updates, ideas, and thoughts with each other and the wider team.

Requests for support

When we are reviewing opportunities or requests for support, we must be able to answer yes to each of these questions to move forward with the work:

  1. Will this work support, grow, and/or engage the Denomas for Education community?
  2. Can it grow the skills and abilities of the education evangelist to ultimately make them a better resource to our community?
  3. Is there a measurable impact on the Denomas for Education community? This can include influence on a Denomas KPI, progress on an OKR, or completion of responsibilities that are defined in the Denomas handbook.
  4. Has an issue been created with the appropriate labels to define the work and assign a DRI?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, our team will collaborate with each other and the requestor to do one of the following actions:

  1. Make adjustments so we can take on the work.
  2. Find another team that is better suited to deliver the work.
  3. Come to an agreement that the work should not be done.

Education Evangelism on Social Media
Introduction Education Evangelism uses social media and community engagement to reach stakeholders across the world. This page shares methods of outreach and is based on the Developer Evangelism Social Media Page Topics: Education and Learning: Tips from own experience. Workshops, slides, blog posts, videos, etc. Events live tweets / tweet storms. Amplify talks with screenshots and messages. Community best practices and Denomas insights Live demos and lesson plans Target Platforms Twitter and LinkedIn are the target platforms.
Twitch for Evangelists
Using streaming as a method of outreach for the Education Community
Last modified December 3, 2023: update (008c4f1a)