Front-door process for getting Microsoft support/involvement in community events

[buckleyplanet]

Most of us have extensive experience organizing community events of various shapes and sizes, and one common thread I have heard/experienced is how difficult it can be to get Microsoft's support. Some regions have personnel who understand the value of community and go out of their way to support events, either through funding, attending/speaking, or spreading the word to Microsoft customers, partners, and MS peers. However, in most regions there is a clear disconnect. The problem is threefold:

1) there is no front-door process for community events (to articulate what help is needed and to route the request to the appropriate person/team), 2) local/regional MS personnel generally do not understand how to engage with and support the community to help their own metrics, and 3) community people most often do not understand how local/regional personnel are measured, and how to position/articulate their requests in terms that demonstrate the value (and how they can help MS personnel hit their numbers)

I'd love to have this discussion this week and hear feedback from others, with the goal of drafting a front-door process proposal that could be trialed within one or more Microsoft regions.

[tomresing]

I'm a Microsoft employee and #MVPReconnect member who identifies very closely with the issue and the solutions @buckleyplanet describes very clearly above. I've experienced this issue in a number of locations with a number of user groups and meetups over the past 15 years. For example. currently, I host the Office 365 Seattle Meetup on-campus in Redmond. The organizers, many of who have been organizing user groups for 10+ years, have relied on people like me to navigate the processes to support them. It takes considerable work on my part to arrange funding, find the meeting rooms and figure out how to securely take responsability for a large number of guests on campus. Despite that work, we still lack the three bullets Christian outlines above.

[EricHarlan]

Love to help, I've seen this as well. I think there are a lot of aspects that non employees don't see. Most importantly, "Microsoft" isn't a large pot of funds or time that can be tapped into. Every team has a budget, think 30 people or less sized. That budget is highly dependent on the roles of the folks in that team as well as the overall priority of marketing. This often times means ZERO funding or zero time to get involved, regardless of the obvious benefits to the community that team services.

Aside from that, we as community members see the clear advantage personally of being involved in said community. There is opportunity to drum up business, keep business, personal and corporate status, get information that is otherwise difficult to come by etc. Outside of the simple fact we want to be involved in things to genuinely help other people. That drive sometimes isn't the first priority internally. As most internal folks don't need to consider any of those potential external benefits (at least at first). So it then comes down to marketing dollars and work/life balance.

I think understanding these points lends well to understand how the thought process goes internally at MSFT and how folks who are both community members as well as employees can help bridge that gap. I love the idea of helping community members verbalize the ROI for MSFT in getting involved in an event or organization. Simply having an event doesn't always automatically define its importance in the broader picture.

[buckleyplanet]

@scottgu was just asked a question about multiple MS-focused events hitting a city within weeks of each other, causing devs to ask "Which event should I be attending?" that kind of touches on the points above. Scott tried to answer in part on Microsoft's efforts to consolidate/align technology approaches, but also address the events issue. A big part of the problem IMO is that while community people generally try to schedule around MS planned events, MS people tend to not be aware of and therefor schedule over community-run events in a region (when they should be trying harder to embrace/support/participate in these events).