The DevPortal Award for Best Community Spotlight and Outreach is offered to the developer portal that answers these questions:
- How can you show that your portal is trustworthy?
- How can you enroll your users in a programme that will help your organization gain visibility?
API users need the best solution to solve their task at hand. You need to convince them —through your devportal— that your APIs and products provide that solution over a long period of time. In other words, building trust and keeping it alive are key: how can you achieve this?
We will highlight the criteria that we think define the Best Community Spotlight & Outreach category and showcase how previously nominated devportals stood out.
Best Community Spotlight & Outreach
This category addresses devportals with creative solutions or initiatives to show developers that their work is appreciated.
In the downstream developer journey, community and engagement are the most important in the following steps:
- Troubleshoot: How can I, as a user, interact with others to find solutions?
- Celebrate: How can I share what I implemented? How can I show my special solutions? How and where can I meet with others? Can the API provider use my knowledge?
Engage users to find solutions, share knowledge & build connections
How can you help developers troubleshoot, provide and find solutions, share knowledge and build connections? Consider, for example:
- a community page (e.g. to announce webinars and to feature champion users),
- a blog with articles dedicated to interesting solutions that require out-of-the-box thinking (e.g. use cases),
- a third-party community page (e.g. GitHub),
- a discussion forum,
- asking users to write documentation about niche problems (developer docs),
- organizing events and hackathons,
- enabling different contact forms to report bugs and issues directly to your team.
Shopify’s community page enables an easy search, discussions, links to specific topics (note also the legal documentation) and to latest posts. The company also lists their champion authors.
Cisco’s “Community” section in the top menu covers an overview of all community related platforms and support options.
In short, the goal is to enable your users to plan for the future, help them to interact with peers and engage them to share their experience and expertise — all in order to establish trust in your portal and, eventually, to turn your users into your portal’s advocates.
The examples in this post are taken from some of the previous DevPortal Awards nominees and winners.
The Best Developer Portals Learn more about the award categories for the Developer Portal Awards and how you can submit a nomination.
All Pronovix publications are the fruit of a team effort, enabled by the research and collective knowledge of the entire Pronovix team. Our ideas and experiences are greatly shaped by our clients and the communities we participate in.
About the Author
Kathleen De Roo
Kathleen is an information architect helping clients find out how to align business goals and user needs with the knowledge we gathered about devportals. She grew her expertise through early research on developer portals to determine components, strategy, and best practices for user experience. She holds master's degrees in history and in archival science & records management.
