Fast Forward: How COVID Accelerated our Developer Advocacy into the Future

John Rae-Grant, Vice President, Product Management and Developer Relations at DataStax, shares key lessons he learned when his developer advocacy team adapted to shift toward virtual events during COVID.

With a focus on recreating the experience of togetherness and one-on-one instructor interaction that made in-person events so valuable, his team experimented with a bevy of different services, integrations, and internal processes.

The outcomes were positive:

• Developer advocacy became more consumable. With the shift to virtual, the ability to afford travel costs were no longer a gatekeeper of learning and professional development and it became easier to attract talent from all over the world.
• Developer Advocates improved their quality of life. Job satisfaction increased due to the lack of constant traveling. At the same time, DAs were able to reach more developers than ever before and capture a more persistent record of product feedback with online interactions.
• The pandemic opened up their technology to a worldwide audience. Hosting virtual events increases the volume of people you can target, since you have less of a captive audience than you would with in-person events. However, since you're now competing with everything else on the Internet, your content must be entertaining and informative.

Read his blog post for all the details.