As the new year begins, I took a look back at what I managed to pull off in 2020. This was my first full calendar year managing the Technical Evangelism team at Sitecore, so my way of contributing changed a little bit this year.

One of my most proud accomplishments has been our official Discover Sitecore channel where our team tries to publish videos from a variety of experts to help people as they learn Sitecore. We’ve been growing that channel over the last few years and are getting close to 7K subscribers now! We added 1.1K subscribers in 2020 alone, along with 135K views, and I hope we can grow even more in the coming year.

I loved seeing more people come to our channel, but I wanted to take a look and get a sense of what type of individual public contributions I was still able to make, professionally, in 2020.

The Numbers

These infographics show a quick glance at some of the metrics around articles, videos, and Twitter (my primary channels). I also decided to use some holiday time and this post to learn a little about Canva. It’s pretty nice and easy to use!

The Articles

While I primarily post to my own blog, I also contribute occasionally to sitecore.com and the Tech Marketing blog on community.sitecore.net. I seem to be averaging about 1K views per article published, which is pretty far down from a few year’s back when I was writing more about agile and tools like Trello and Visual Studio Online. Perhaps my keywords and content are a little too niche now? This is something I’ll experiment with in 2021.

Here is a breakdown of the articles published this year.

The Videos

Most of my content goes to Discover Sitecore, but sometimes I have a YouTube video on another channel. I definitely produced more videos than I starred in this year, and I think in 2021 I’d like to work on recording more videos for my own channel to go with the blogs I write. However, I also know that I’m not really reaching a lot of people on that channel so it’s hard to justify the time investment.

The Presentations

With the pandemic this year it was both easier, and harder, to do presentations. On the one hand, I was able to present at SUGs that I would never usually be able to travel to through the year. However, it was also a lot harder to find the time and mental space to apply to conference CFPs and contact SUG organizers. I already have one conference spot lined up for 2021, and I’m hoping to do more speaking outside of the Sitecore community this year.

These were the events I did during this past year:

Looking ahead to 2021

I believe in this coming year we are going to see new experiments in virtual events now that most organizations have learned what didn’t work for them in 2020. I want to find a way to be a part of that, and that means making more mental space for applying to conferences and building a new talk.

In past years I’ve focused on ethics, kindness, and getting started with metrics, but this year may be the year to start talking about managing a team in a global and virtual world, or making that management transition from being an independent contributor.

I also feel like I need to be getting up to speed with OBS and other tech around virtual presentations. If I want to be part of the creativity that is coming, I will need to do some learning!

What are your plans for the coming year?