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.
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 of 2020 Learn more about the ten nomination categories for the Developer Portal Awards of 2020 and how you can submit a nomination.
Read more Nominate a Developer Portal