Contributed by Stefanie Buck and Joel Gustafson

OER are only good if they are discoverable but just submitting them to an Institutional repository is not enough. There is a true marketing opportunity when letting people know about the OER we produce. Marketing is so much more than outreach or advertising, it is thoughtful communication that can help shift how people think about open. In this blog, a marketing manager who has worked with OER and the director of OER at a public institution will share some tips and best practices on how to build a marketing strategy for your OER.

When I interviewed for the position of Director of Open Educational Resources at Oregon State University (OSU), the search committee asked, “How will you grow the brand?” I did not have a great response to this. Librarians are notoriously bad at marketing our services and ourselves. Having been in the job for 2.5 years, I am starting to understand marketing better. I am in the fortunate position of having a marketing manager to support me, though I realize that is not the norm for most OER programs. I also have a marketing budget, which is unusual too. However, even without these support structures, we can still promote our OER materials and initiatives more effectively. What can you do to help market your OER even if you do not have a budget or a support team?

The first thing we should do is define marketing. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” Essentially it is the effective communication from an entity (in this case you) to an audience (in this case our faculty and students) through select channels of communication. 

At its best, marketing is a conversation between you and your audience, using specific channels of communication. The role of all marketing is to create and nurture a dynamic and personalized dialogue or exchange of information. Typically, this involves the exchange of money for a product or service, but marketing OER is unique because there is no monetary exchange involved. It is less of a product but more of an idea or a call to action. For example, our call to action is “We make learning affordable. You can too.” 

It is easy to get lost in the complexities of OER when planning a marketing campaign. We can break effective marketing down into five basic stages. All of these stages inform your marketing deliverable.

1. Define yourself. Until you know who you are and what you can and cannot offer, you cannot develop an effective marketing strategy. What is it you (or your unit) does and why are you trying to promote OER? Ideally, you are trying to expand or improve upon what you have; in our case, we want more faculty to adapt, adopt or author OER. We want more people to use openly licensed materials in their classrooms. What you can do marketing-wise will, of course, depend on your bandwidth but it is essential that you answer these questions first. 

2. Define your audience. This is generally understood, but it is true that the better we know our audience’s wants and needs, the better we can deliver and build the trust necessary for a successful brand. A large part of marketing is thoughtful research about the audience you are trying to reach. In the case of an OER coordinator or librarian, we generally have two audiences we are dealing with; faculty and students. A third possible audience is other OER experts; we communicate our successes and failures with them and learn from each other. The way you market the product (in this case the OER or the idea of OER) will be different for your two audiences. Our call-to-action for faculty is that we want them to adopt, adapt or author open educational resources. For our students, our messaging goal is that we want them to feel heard and that we want them to know our product is accessible. For either audience, you want to make the experience of taking action or understanding the message as easy as possible.

3. Define the channels available for you to communicate with your audience. You may have control over some channels (e.g. an OER blog) but for others, you may need to collaborate (e.g. the university newspaper). The channels we use at Oregon State University to communicate with our audience are primarily our website, our daily institutional news summary (OSU Today), and various social media channels including Instagram and Facebook for our student audience and LinkedIn for our faculty audience. Think about where you can show up, for example, the university newsletter or a departmental blog, and how these channels connect with your audience, then work with those individuals who own those channels to send your message. 

4. Define your goals. What is it that you want to achieve? What we want here is not just a push of information but a conversation. For example, we asked students how they would spend the money if they didn’t have to purchase textbooks. We posted their comments to the website, not for the students to read but to engage the faculty and let the students’ voices be heard. Hopefully, those student comments will encourage faculty to consider OER. In this way, the students themselves serve as an aspect of our marketing strategy. Think about how often you will want to engage with your audience. Setting up a cadence of communication (monthly blog post, weekly tweet) will depend on your bandwidth and the channels available to you. For example, if you want to market a new open textbook, what is an effective and reasonable cadence for sharing this information?

5. Define how you will measure success. One of the goals of marketing is to build trust between the entity offering the product or service and the audience. You will want to audit what you do regularly so you can adjust your strategy. Open Education Week is an important event at OSU. After Open Education Week, our marketing manager and I sat down, performed an audit of what went well and what did not go well, and then adjusted our strategy accordingly. Marketing builds affinity and trust and you can do this by sharing your successes. For example, sharing the number of times an OER has been downloaded or a regular feature on how faculty are implementing OER in their classroom (we call this OER@work) can help to foster engagement. Get the metrics for your OER usage if possible. At OSU, we built a data dashboard using Google Analytics to see how often and where our OER are used. We track analytics for page counts of our website to see where the most traffic is and use that in the redesign of our website. Trust also develops when the customer knows the product or experience is good. It means they will return to it again and again. 

At Oregon State, we have started to promote our textbooks, not just make them available on our Pressbooks site. We make sure that there is a marketing flyer and we provide a marketing toolkit for each textbook that comes out. The toolkit includes copy that is purpose-built for different channels and enables collaborators to effectively and efficiently share updates through their networks. We have a common brand or theme for our book covers, we are implementing peer-review and have already implemented copy editing for most of our publications. We make sure to represent our texts in the OEN Library and OER Commons as well as our own hub on the Commons. Marketing is always changing. Each product may require its own unique marketing strategy. We still have a ways to go before we really have our brand in place but it is foremost on our minds as we continue to work with faculty and students to help reduce barriers to learning.

Stefanie Buck is the director of Open Educational Resources at Oregon State University. She supports faculty who want to adopt, adapt or author an open educational resource through grants and other services. She has an MLS from the University of Hawai’i and an M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Joel Gustafson is a Digital Marketing and UX manager at Oregon State University Ecampus. Joel’s previous professional experience spans a variety of industries ranging from brand management in the organic food industry to creative development and UX/UI design at Intel.

This post is by Sefanie Buck and Joel Gustafson and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.