I am happy to let you know that I have been re-elected to the Drupal association board of directors. I ran for the position of fund raiser and I believe when the board next meets we will agree to have me continue in that role.

I'd like to talk a little bit about why I ran for this position, and the approaches I've pursued in raising funds for the Drupal project.

The Drupal association is an unusual entity in the Drupal project. It's the only part of the project that is organized as a legal business.

As a business, the association ultimately survives based on it's ability to pull in revenue and spend that revenue effectively. In our first year, approximately 500 people decided to give us money. Not buy something tangible from us. Just give it to us. I consider it a great honor that these people would choose to trust us with their hard earned money. I believe we've effectively used their money to add approximately $25 000 in hardware and run two successful conferences which have contributed greatly to Drupal's success in 2007.

I came to the Drupal project through CivicSpace. I joined after the DeanSpace days. However, I understood the power of the lessons learned from that campaign, and helped tens of thousands of people to make use of powerful community organizing and fund raising tools. I understood that taking the time to reach out to the long tail can pay off in the long run.

The Drupal project is huge. Almost 9000 unique individuals filed issues in the last year. Over 1800 users on Drupal.org list themselves as Drupal related service providers.

With the size of the community in mind, the center piece of my fund raising strategy has been to have an affordable membership program. I conducted a survey of almost 1200 Drupal users and developed a membership program that balance my personal time to offer benefits, with pricing that members of the community would be willing to pay. To date over 350 individuals and organizations have chosen to purchase a membership. We have grown their benefits from just a simple directory listing, to also include a badge. Over time, as more volunteers contribute benefits, we will attract even more members. The membership program has been been officially launched for just a few weeks and I am happy with the growth we have seen.

We also have a successful donation program. A popular request we often get is, "I've just had a successful customer project with Drupal and I'd like to give a portion of my revenue back to the association". I think that's great.

Of course, not everyone can contribute directly to the project. But many people are willing to tolerate a relevant advertisement. We've carefully listened to the community, and launched a small bit of advertising with Google Adsense. The revenue is not significant, but we've clearly demonstrated that Drupal related businesses want to buy ads, and only a very small number of people have found the ads to be objectionable.

We've also recently launched an affiliate advertising program. We piloted the program with Achieve Internet, who helped with the technical infrastructure. We are now using this ad space to advertise the Drupalcon job fair. We will shortly launch an affiliate advertising program for Drupal hosting. There are two reasons for doing this. First, affiliate sales ads can bring in significant revenue. With the money you pay for your hosting, the association can earn money to pay for Drupal.org. Second, creating fiscal relationships with hosting partners can allow the association to help resolve technical and business problems with hosts. Sometimes it's easier to get to the boss to respond to a security issue, if you've got a business relationship. I learned this from Matt from Wordpress.

We've also been creating relationships with book publishers, and Amazon.com. We receive income from the click through for books ads on Drupal.org. We have also negotiated sales commissions for those books. Dries has been working hard on promoting new Drupal book deals, and with those new deals we hope to fund the association.

We also run fund raising directly for Drupal conferences. Right now, we are conducting our biggest fund raising campaign ever. Over the next few weeks we will be reaching out to these businesses that benefit from the Drupal project. These business get a lot from the Drupal project, the collaboration that that occurs on Drupal.org, and the market place the Drupal helps to create. The Drupal conference is the central planning meeting for the Drupal project. Thousands of hours of work are started and coordinated in person at this conference. It's a key part of getting Drupal 7 to be a successful release.

The fund raising campaign for Drupalcon has started. Many businesses are evaluating the benefits we've offered with the Drupalcon sponsorships. Over the next few weeks, I'll be contacting businesses and explaining why the Drupal conference is a critical to a successful Drupal 7. I'll be explaining how the Drupal development process works, and the importance of an all day sprint to have over 100 people working on Drupal full time for a full day in the same room. I'll explain why keeping the Drupal conference fees low, at $195, makes it easier for community to grow the Drupal talent base, and in turn help provide the talent needed to grow these businesses.

Which brings me to why I ran for the fund raising position. I love selling Drupal. I love talking about all the amazing things this community is capable of doing. I love asking the hard questions about what we need to improve. I love the honor of representing this community, and playing a small part in supporting what this community will do.

If you enjoy supporting Drupal, and need some help getting your business to sponsor the Drupal conference, I am ready to help you. Talk to your colleagues and explain why supporting the Drupal conference is important. You've already done a great job convincing your customers and colleagues to use Drupal, and to share code. They'll listen to you when you say it's important to support the conference as well.

With Drupal, the more you give, the more you get.