Release Marketing

This page contains notes on what needs to be done when marketing new GNOME releases.

Marketing Elements

Essential things that need doing for each release:

• Organize and promote release parties

• Release notes

• Announcement news post on gnome.org
• Update the screenshots on gnome.org
• Social media posts, in the run up to the release, to announce it, and immediately after the release

• Update the getting GNOME page, to make sure that the details about which version of GNOME is in which distro are correct

• Send a mail to Friends of GNOME donors to thank them for their support

Also nice to have:

• Email members of the press in advance, to inform them about the upcoming release and give them advance access to the release notes and screenshot pack (under embargo)

• Screenshot packs

• Release parties

• Send an email to Friends of GNOME donors, telling them about the release and thanking them for their support.

Schedule

4 Weeks Prior

• Start planning - who is going to take responsibility for what?
• Start writing release notes
• Investigate what the live image situation will be for the release
• Update press contact list

2 Weeks Prior

• Finalise release notes
• Upload screenshot pack www.people.gnome.org/~engagement/screenshots

1 Week Prior

• Write news post
• Prepare updated screenshots for the website

• Prepare updated text for Getting GNOME.

• Contact members of the press to inform them of the release date and give them access to the release notes
• Reach out to release team to coordinate the announcement - should be in regular communication with whoever is making the release
• Reach out to the sysadmin team to make sure that people are on standby to unlock the release notes and deal with the side effects of increased website load
• Write the release announcement that will be sent to Friends of GNOME donors

How To

This section includes instructions on how to do some of the tasks associated with marketing releases.

Release Notes

See ReleaseNotes.

Updating gnome.org Screenshots

New screenshots need to match the dimensions of the existing ones. Steps to update the screenshots:

1. Take the screenshots and crop and resize to match the existing ones (don't alter the aspect ratio!)
2. Upload to the gnome.org media library (accessible through the Wordpress dashboard).
3. Create an unpublished draft page, and copy the content from the GNOME 3 page. Change the image links to point to the new versions of the screenshots, and check that everything looks OK on the page.
4. When it is time to update the live version of the site, copy the page content over from the draft page to the live page, then update it.
5. Once the live page is update, you can delete the draft page you created.

To update the screenshot on the home page, you need to make a change to the gnome-web-www Git repository (this contains the gnome.org Wordpress theme), as in this commit.

Make sure that all screenshots follow the guidelines!

Screenshot Packs

Each screenshot pack typically contains a wider selection of screenshots than in the release notes. It includes cropped and resized screenshots to 940px wide, as well as full size images.

Previous screenshot packs can be browsed here.

After creating the screenshot pack .zip file, it should be uploaded to the Engagement Team webspace. You will need to be given access to this by the sysadmin team, after which you can follow these instructions to connect and upload.

Release Announcement

Each release is initially announced by the release team as an email to the gnome-announce mailing list. The Engagement Team should only publish its own release materials after this has happened.

Someone on the Engagement Team needs to be responsible for coordinating each release announcement. Responsibilities of the release marketing coordinator:

• Make contact with the Release Team member who is responsible for the release (it is a good idea to hang out on #release-team for this).
• Make sure that the Release Team does not announce the release before you and the rest of the Engagement Team are ready with all the release marketing materials.
• Be available on IRC during release day.
• Ensure that release announcement steps are made in the correct order.

Once the Release Team is ready to send the announcement email, take the following steps:

• Update the screenshots on gnome.org.
• Get a sysadmin to take the password off the release notes page. Wait for it to go live (this can take a little time).
• Ask the Release Team to send their announcement email.

Once the Release Team's announcement email has been sent:

• If there's a release video on YouTube, make it public.

• Finalise the news post on gnome.org:
  • Include a quote from the announcement email.
  • Embed the release video, if there is one.
  • Link to the official announcement email in the mailing list archives.
• Post the news story on www.gnome.org.
• Announce the release on social media, linking to the gnome.org news post. (Or ask others to do this.)

• Send email release announcement to Friends of GNOME donors (this is an optional step that requires coordination with TobiasMueller).

Release announcements usually occur during the afternoon (UTC) on the scheduled release date.