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Open Educational Resources Collective Publishing Workflow

Conduct Marketing Activities

Marketing OER

Now that you’ve published your OER, it’s time to let your audience know.

If you don’t have any experience with marketing or promotion, consulting with the marketing department at your university can help you get started. They can work with you to develop a general marketing plan for OER and assist with promoting specific releases through official university communication channels.

Remember that every OER project is different, so you’ll need to keep adjusting your marketing approach.

Marketing Roles

While anyone on your publishing team can market your OER, it’s a good idea to provide a clear promotional plan, along with resources to help them communicate with a consistent message. Some of the roles involved in marketing an OER are:

  • Project leaders – create the plan and decide on the strategies to deploy
  • Communications lead – assembles the promotional material, writes a project summary, composes social media posts and other blurbs
  • Contributors – provide (or solicit) reviewer blurbs, endorsements and recommendations for communications channels. 

Determining Your OER’s Audience

The story of your OER starts before it’s even written, with the reasons for creating it, the content it covers, your intended audience and your authoring and publishing teams.

Knowing as many details as possible about the author will help you understand the target audience. For example:

  • What field are they a specialist in?
  • What membership organisations do they belong to?
  • What conferences do they attend?

Some publishers develop a marketing questionnaire to send to authors at the beginning of the project, although some other tools you can use to help you determine the audience include:

  • The project proposal
  • The OER itself
  • Comments from peer reviewers
  • Meetings with the author

Marketing and Promotion

Preparing for promotion

There are several tasks which can help prepare for OER promotion activities, these include: 

  • Discoverability (so readers, adopters and adapters can get their hands on the OER when they want it). Enable this by:
    • Maintaining a public listing for the project
    • Submitting completed content to repositories
    • Ensuring metadata is comprehensive and accurate
  • Seeking expert support, for example contacting the communications and marketing department of your university and ask if they’ll publish an article about your OER in their next newsletter
  • Developing artefacts and processes, which may include: 
    • Email signatures (which can keep the project front of mind as you interact with people)
    • Promotional materials (that not only reinforce the value that your resource brings, but do so in quick and friendly formats), e.g. Slide decks, blurbs or review quotes and pamphlets
    • Print copies of the OER for potential adopters (to put a physical presence on their desk – front of view, front of mind!)
    • Project mailing list (for more frequent and detailed updates)

Different promotion avenues

Once preparation tasks are complete, there are many avenues to share promotional materials. Explore some examples below: 

Different promotion avenues infographic. Accessible text version provided below.

> Text version of Infographic (select to expand)

Different promotion avenues

Email

  • Use email and mailing lists to inform colleagues, as well as department heads
  • Listserv discussions (so you can become an engaged participant in a community, naturally directing people to your resource)

Example: SPARC Open Education Forum

Social media

  • Social media (either from your accounts or a dedicated project account, sharing updates and other relevant content)

Example: A LinkedIn post from Pressbooks promoting Open Education Down UndOER

Events

  • Conferences provide opportunities to present, be challenged, make connections and reconsider what you think you ‘know’ about your project and how to make it better in a future release

Example: OE Global Conference session for the launch of Open Education Down UndOER

Blogs and newsletters

  • Blog posts (with clear links to more content that’s useful to your audience) and milestone announcements (providing information on what someone can do next, like contribute, review or adopt)

Example: Australasian OEP Digest

Networking

  • Community calls (to share updates, gather feedback and reinforce community building)

Example: A call for submissions and contributions for Open Education Down UndOER

Sharing and Distribution

Below are some places you can distribute an OER:

Many OER collections allow authors to submit requests for their OER to be included. Some repositories require that a new OER meet certain criteria, such as an evaluation by a subject matter expert. Below are some examples of where you can apply:

Wherever possible, it’s best to link back to the webbook in Pressbooks (or wherever you’re hosting your OER) to avoid having to update files and information in multiple locations. 

Attributions

Adapted from:

'Storytelling & Communications Summary’ and ‘Storytelling & Communications Overview’ in The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) by Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

'Marketing an Open Textbook’ in Open Textbook Publishing Orientation (PUB 101) by Open Education Network, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence, based on ‘Unit 6 Assessing Impact: Purposeful Marketing, Promotion, Publicity – Narrative’ in Library Publishing Curriculum, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

‘Where to Share’ in Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Falldin and Karen Lauritsen, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

'Communications’ in Self-Publishing Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.