O8 is a digital agency designed for marketing teams – we are highly technical, strategic, design-oriented, and able to make websites grow huge amounts of inbound traffic and leads. We have special expertise in marketing automation, including HubSpot.

We are based in Minneapolis, MN with a global presence. We have been working with Drupal since 2010 as a company, and far longer as individuals – we are comprised of Drupal experts and industry veterans.

Our expertise:

  • Drupal and WordPress
  • CRMs like Hubspot and Salesforce
  • UX Design
  • Digital Marketing: SEO, paid ads, strategy
  • Growth Marketing and CRO

Serving higher ed, health care, nonprofits, financial services, senior living, and startups, from SMBs to the enterprise.

We are good, honest, hard-working Minnesotans who want to make the day-to-day for our clients a fruitful, less-stressful, more productive experience. Learn more at https://www.o8.agency/.

Training

Learning by Doing: Mentored Sprints (For Technical People)

We believe the best technical learning happens when everyone is actively working in a team towards a common goal, learning by doing, producing tangible results and in-house knowledge of what is being built. When learning a platform like Drupal, and especially when considering the build of a platform of which you want to take ownership in-house, a mentored sprint model is ideal.

In this model, we do not attempt to take the place of self-study from the multitude of information online at Drupal.org and instructional sites such as buildamodule.com, but rather guide that study by daily Scrum-style meetings, bi-weekly sprint planning and review meetings, and task-based support requests.

This mentored sprint model is used at the annual Drupal conference, which many of our team members have attended and found very useful. We also use it with our clients, who often have an in-house developer who is not at all or less familiar with Drupal, needs best practice advice, guidance, support, and the ability to delegate.

Rather than trying to pack 8 hours of intensive learning into each day, we find it’s best to dedicate about one hour daily to a Scrum-style meeting, and the rest of the day to self-study, working on tangible outcomes, and sending adhoc questions and support requests for our team. We also recognize that you have an existing platform to support, meetings, and other job-related duties, which this won’t interrupt.

Highly Customized Training (For Non-technical People)

As a non-technical stakeholder in your web presence, do you want to learn from generic Drupal instructional videos or coursework packages? Do you enjoy reading and referencing training manuals or stale digital courses? Not many people answer these questions affirmatively, because they don’t apply to your specific website and digital ecosystem.

We take time to do a thorough discovery of your existing ecosystem, or, if building out a new one, involve you and your team in the production so that you are learning as it is being created. We do screen shares, answering questions as they arise over Slack and Zoom video conference calls.

For very complex situations, we can definitely do training at scale, producing eLearning libraries and lessons. However, for the majority of situations, we find that dynamic, co-created, just-in-time training is far superior to stale video, text, and course libraries.

Drupal contributions

As a collective, we at O8 make code and volunteering contributions to the community whenever we can, contributing actively in forums, submitting patches and suggested fixes. We've been Drupal advocates at organizations as large as Estée Lauder and as small as start-up companies just getting off the ground. We've also attended several DrupalCons and DrupalCamps across the world, and are active locally to help organize, sponsor and promote events and camps, including the Twin Cities Drupal Camp that occurs yearly in the same city as our headquarters: http://tcdrupal.org

One supported contributor role

Contributor roles

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ckng

From 2012-03 to present