Marketing Practices

Marketing Practices

What CivicTechWR actually publishes, drawn from every source we could retrieve on 2026-08-23. This is the observed practice, not a proposal — the raw material sits in marketing/archive/.

Decisions and tooling are on Marketing. This page is evidence.

---

The headline

Our content pipeline stopped in September 2025 and has not restarted. Not the blog alone — recaps, blog and social all went quiet together.

Season	Dates	Recaps written	Blog posts
4	Mar–Jun 2025	11	2
5	Jun–Sep 2025	12	1 (finale)
6	Sep–Dec 2025	0	0
7	Jan–Apr 2026	2	0
8	May–Aug 2026	1	0

Seasons 4 and 5 had near-complete weekly recap coverage. Then it stops. The last recap is 2026-05-14 (Season 8 weeks 1–2); the season runs to 2026-08-26 with nothing since.

This matters for planning: there is no running content engine to harvest. Restarting the recap habit is itself a task, not a given.

---

Channels, by actual use

Channel	Reach	Output	State
LinkedIn	213 followers	Regular, on-brand, best-produced	The real channel
Luma	—	40 events, unbroken weekly cadence	Healthy
Discourse	Members only	28 recaps, stalled since May	Stalled
Blog	Public	11 posts ever, silent 11 months	Stalled
Bluesky	8 followers, 1 post	Created 2026-03-08, posted once	Effectively dead
Instagram / Threads / Facebook	Unknown	Not retrievable without login	Unmeasured

Two things stand out. LinkedIn is doing the real work and is the only channel with a consistent voice. Bluesky is linked prominently in the site footer and has one post and eight followers — we are advertising a channel we do not use.

---

Post types we already write

Derived from the LinkedIn archive. This is a de facto taxonomy — nobody wrote it down, but it is consistent.

Type	Example	Reactions
Speaker announcement (advance)	"This month, we're welcoming guest speaker Kristy Guthrie…"	2
Speaker lineup / date change	"📅 Heads up: we have new dates for our guest speaker lineup!"	2–3
Speaker recap (after)	"We had a wonderful guest speaker last week…"	14
Season showcase promo	"Join us on August 26 for our Season 8 Showcase!" + project list	11
Countdown	"1 week! That's how long is left until our Season 7 Project Showcase"	9
Day-of reminder	"Today is the day! Join us TONIGHT…"	4
Mid-season call to action	"We're mid-season — the perfect time to jump in" (carousel)	10
Pitch night promo	"This week, we'll be hosting our Season 8 Pitch Night!"	2
Partner amplification	Reshared CommuniHacks	143

What performs: recaps and human interest (14), showcase promos naming real projects (11), mid-season "come join" carousels (10). What doesn't: bare logistics — pitch night, day-of reminders, speaker announcements without a story (2–4).

The lesson is legible: posts with a person or a project in them outperform posts with only a date in them by roughly 4×.

---

Conventions we already follow

Consistent enough to write down as-is.

Emoji as field labels — 📅 date · 📍 location · 📣 speaker · 🎤 talk · 🛠️ build · ✅ get involved · 👉 register · 👀 curiosity hook

Standard event block

📅 Wednesdays, 5:30 – 8:00 p.m.
📍 The Builders Club (165 King Street W)
👉 Register: <luma link>

Speaker format — 📣 Name | Date, then one line on who they are and why it matters.

Closing CTA — every post ends with a link, usually Luma or an lnkd.in short link.

Voice — warm, plain, invitational. "Whether you code, design, analyze, organize, or just care about the community, there's a seat for you at the table." No jargon, no corporate register, occasional humour ("PS there shall be food").

---

Inconsistencies worth fixing in the guide

Venue name — six variants across ten posts The Builders Club · Builder's Club · the Builders Club in Kitchener (165 King St W) · The Builders Club at 165 King Street W · Downtown Kitchener Builder's Club · the Builder's Club in DTK Pick one, with and without the apostrophe settled.

Event titles on Luma — renamed mid-stream Civic Tech WR for 12 events (Nov 2025 – Mar 2026), then CivicTechWR Hacknight from 2026-03-18 onward. Speaker events use three different separators: - with X of Y · - Guest Speaker X, Y · with guest speaker X. Showcases use | Season N.

Start time — moved twice, and a sixth variant is in the wild Luma shows 19:00 (Nov 2025 – Feb 2026) → 18:30 (Feb–Mar 2026) → 17:30 (Mar 2026 onward). A LinkedIn post from ~3 months ago says "We meet on Wednesday at 5:45 PM" — a time that appears in no other source. Other LinkedIn posts correctly say 5:30–8:00. See Drift-Findings finding 11.

Link shorteners — three in use luma.com/... direct, lnkd.in/... (LinkedIn auto), and we self-host Shlink at s.ctwr.org, which is used for none of it and would give us click data.

---

Event programming, observed

40 events, 2025-11-05 → 2026-08-26. Weekly Wednesdays with deliberate breaks (late December, Canada Day week, the week after a showcase).

Type	Count
Hacknight	27
Showcase	3
Pitch Night	3
Speaker night	3
Hackathon (mini / ideation)	2
Social (holiday party)	1
Partner event	1

Season shape, confirmed by our own marketing: Pitch Night → Ideation/Mini Hackathon → build weeks → Showcase. A LinkedIn post describes Season 7 as "the last 16 weeks" — which contradicts the documented 12-week season and matches the ~15–16 weeks measured in Drift-Findings finding 06. Our public marketing is more accurate than our internal guideline.

Roughly one guest speaker a month during a season, which matches the stated intent in the volunteer roles post.

---

What this suggests for the guide

1. Write the post-type taxonomy down — nine types already exist and are used consistently. That is most of a guide.
2. Lead with people and projects, not dates. The engagement data is unambiguous.
3. Fix the venue name and event-title conventions. Cheap, and they are the most visible inconsistencies.
4. Decide about Bluesky — commit to it or remove it from the footer. One post and eight followers while linked from the homepage is the worst of both.
5. Restart recaps before planning a blog cadence. The recap habit was the input to everything else, and it is not currently running.
6. Route links through Shlink so posts become measurable at no extra cost.