Regional Director? MVP? Evangelist?

If you are reading blogs/articles, listening to Podcasts or watching Screencasts related to Microsoft technologies sooner or later you will come across these three titles:

• Regional Director
• MVP (Microsoft Valued Professional)
• Evangelist

Most of us will ignore these titles and make various assumptions about who these people are, who they work for, and what they do day-to-day. On occasion someone I know will reference these titles and many times misrepresent them.

To try and clarify the confusion I am making this post that will provide a quick overview of each role and try to bring some sense to the collections of Titles and Acronyms that makes Microsoft famous.

Regional Director

The most important thing I can say about Regional Directors is that they don't work for Microsoft and they don't control any Microsoft regions. This title sounds very grandiose and serious, but in reality its merely a group of people who volunteer their time to try and become a connection between Microsoft and the community.

To not recreate the wheel here is the official description that Microsoft provides on its Regional Directors website:

Regional Directors aren't Microsoft employees--they're independent developers, architects, trainers, and other professionals who provide a vital link between Microsoft and the developer community.

These technical experts can give you the insight and informed perspective you need to start developing .NET-connected software today--whether you need help learning about the .NET Framework, training developers, or implementing all aspects of a solution. Contact a Microsoft-endorsed Regional Director to kick off your project today.

The group of Regional Directors is not very large and as of the day of this postings it stands at 117 people. Many famous people in the community are Regional Directors including Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell, Mark Dunn, and 114 others. (click here for the list)

The people in the program span a large amount of products and service specialities including SQL Server, .NET, Mobile Development, Software Architecture, SharePoint, etc. By aligning the people with the technologies they work with or enjoying it provides a powerful engine to gather feedback for the Microsoft Product teams and at the same time give back to the community.

So the odds are if you read blogs, go to user group meetings, attend conferences or listen to Podcasts you've come across Regional Directors and their community contributions, even if you dont know it.

A good question is though: how does one become a Regional Director? Honestly I am not sure and will update this post once I find out. Its not something I even questioned myself until I started writing this entry and it is an important question.

The program itself is evolving and expanding so I would expect many changes in the coming years. As of today though every Regional Director I know of more then deserves their title due to the contribute they have provided for the entire community.

Microsoft Valued Professional (MVP)

MVP's are another category of people acknowledged and empowered by Microsoft without actually working for the company (just like Regional Directors above). Here is how the official Microsoft website describe the program participants:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

Generally people become MVP's through an internal nomination process. Various people in Microsoft look at people who are contributing in their areas of expertise and nominate them for a particular technical category. One does not stay an MVP forever once awarded and must sustain a level of contribution to the community to keep receiving their status during the yearly reviews.

So how is an MVP different then a Regional Director? The main thing I always sensed was that Regional Directors interface with the community at a higher level, a more general one, while MVP's typically represent a specific technology subset. I honestly cant give you an exact different here beyond this description and would love someone's feedback if they understand this better.

MVP's include people such as Jamie Thompson for SSIS or Rick Strahl and Jon Skeet for .NET technologies. There are many MVP's (more then Regional Directors) and all the ones that I know are very bright people who contribute tons of content, Media, forum response and articles to the community.

The perks available to MVP's beyond community status and recognition is is access to free MSDN / TechNET Magazine, access to internal Microsoft News Groups and usually greater access to the teams who's products they represent (through special MVP leads who are dedicated to supporting them).

Evangelists

This last title of Evangelist is finally a category of people that do actually work for Microsoft. These FTE's (full time employees) are dedicated to tasks such as:

• Providing training and demonstration using the web and community events
• Writing code samples
• Blogging
• Working with MVP's and Evangelists to help guide the external community leads
• Gather feedback from the community for Microsoft
• Speak / Present at Conferences

One good post on this topic is found at this link, which is Kevin Trethewey's blog. Also, while I cant find at the moment a very good link that lists all Evangelists here is one link that does have a good number of them.

Some Evangelists that I follow include Daniel Moth and Scott hanselman. Both are very inspiring and talented individuals who's Screencasts and blog posts have tremendously helped me over the last year to keep up with technology.

As expected Microsoft's global reach requires global Evangelism, therefore many of the people in this category are strategically located throughout the world.

In my opinion evangelists are extremely important. Being they are dedicated 9am to 5pm to work on reaching out to the community on the large array of systems, frameworks and other technologies they become the face of Microsoft for developers. This is a crucial role and without it such a large scale effort as Microsoft is undertaking would be much harder to keep on track.

Closing

I hope this posts helps clarify some of the confusion around these three titles and If anything is incorrect or if you have more information to add to this, please don't hesitate to email me or write a response in this posts comment thread.