20110809 Marketing Call

Notes from the marketing call held on August 9, 2011

Present: Grant Wood, Rene Spronk, Harry Solomon, Andrea (HQ), Martin Entwhisthle, Bhavana Patel.

• Bhavana Patel (LinkedIn is a new volunteer, representing CHI / the standards collaborative in Canada, involved in stakleholder engagement. Her intent is to take over the tole previous served by Marge Kennedy.
• Grant: Chuck is not on the call - I had 3 questions for him to clarify the direction of the marketing council and its work on the marketing plan:
  1. What should the marketing council be focusing upon?
  2. product briefs of products. TSC is working on this as well. hat's the strategy behind these product brief activities?
  3. How can marketing work with US / international requirements, how to coordinate marketing with affiliate activities?
• Rene: to me, the answer to #1 above is partly in the Marketing Plan, in the section entitled 'challenges'. Challenges are actionable (using marketing strategies, within the next year or so) issue. They'll need priorization, and the board obviously has a say in this, however the challenges themselves may be identified by the marketing council, by the board, or by yet other parties. Each challenge should then have related actions in the comminications/actions part of the marketing plan. Each action should have at least one challenge associated with it, which serves as the underlying reason for the action itself.
• ACTION: Grant will send this list of questions to Chuck, for discussion on the e-mail list
• ACTION: Martin offers to create descriptions for the stakeholder categories. We have names for the categories, but no descriptions.
• Bhavana Patel: which stakeholder group repersents the biggest challenge; we could just focus on the group which has the highest priority - most ROI.
• Harry: We need to know how products are used, what is the interest of the stakeholders in the standards.
• Bhavana Patel: value propositions of products. CHI are currently working on a value proposition for SNOMED CT.
• Rene introduces the products section of the marketing plan. We really need to work on products and stakeholders, these are essential parts of the plan.
  • The product categories are based on the product categories for open source software distributors (e.g. Linux). These categories apply to HL7 open standards as well. Of course the devil is in the details: standards is one product category, but there are currently multiple lists of standards as well as multiple hierarchies to organize the view on those standards.
  • Grant: we know the TSC is also working on this
  • Rene: unfortunately there is no overlap between the volunteers in marketing and the TSC, which makes it difficult to harmonize.
  • Andrea: well, the product briefs were created by a marketing company that was extensively briefed by HL7.
  • Rene: There is also (recently) a lack of board participation in Marketing activities.
  • Andrea: Jill and Catherine used to fulfill this role.
• Rene wishes to move this stuff forward. Harry: is there some kind of deadline? Rene: not really, there's the Tuesday evening presentation to the board in San Diego, as well as the Sunday afternoon presentation to the Affiliates Council, but that's basically a status update. However, we need to make sure that we're pressing ahead, when we erote the marketing plan in 2004/2005 it took more than a year to create a reasonable draft.
• ACTION: rene to create a wiki page (this one: Marketing Plan: Challenges) to collect and prioritize challenges.
• Meeting adjourned.