“…you are rubbish at explaining stuff, @Ben_Hall draws me pictures!”
Is something a friend said to me this week. I include it here for two reasons; firstly, because I think it’s funny, but mainly because it’s a succinct reminder of one of the problems of evangelism; that different people absorb information in different ways and require an evangelist to use different media if they are going to get their message across. In this case I was trying to define one of the metrics CodeRush charts (Cyclocmetric Complexity) to a semi technical friend via IM. So, to be fair, I was on a bit of a hiding to nothing as IM is not the ideal medium in which to do this. However, it does show that a good evangelist needs to be aware of how their audience best absorbs information and that they must adapt their delivery (but not the message) accordingly.
Here at DevExpress we are aware of that, and we present our message in a number of ways. Firstly, we do this in person. Now this is my favourite way of getting our message “out there”, though I accept that it is not necessarily the most effective means, if what you are looking to do is to get your message out to a large as audience as possible. As you’ll know Oliver and I are just back from BASTA Spring (you can read about that here, here and here) and I’ll be speaking at events in Glasgow, the South West and Belfast in the coming months, whilst Oliver will be at DevWeek and BASTA Italy in the near future. If you are attending these events please remember to say hello; it’s a lonely old job being an evangelist sometimes :-)
Of course we don’t only deliver the DevExpress message face to face, we also do it face to camera, as it were. Creating videos to help explain our products is another medium that DevExpress make use of to help get the word out.
We’ve not forgotten the written word either, there are blogs covering all our products as well as forums, and of course, the written documentation that we provide. Further to this, if you prefer your written information in small, bite sized pieces, then a number of us are currently to be found hanging out on twitter: Julian, Mehul, Oliver and myself can all be found there, along with the DevExpress account itself.
Getting back to the quote above, we maybe can’t draw you a picture, but we certainly go the extra mile to accommodate your preferred means of absorbing information, but if you feel there is something else we could be doing, then feel free to comment here.