This coming November will mark the first year that the Drupal Community has had full-time employees dedicated to supporting them and the project. A year ago the Drupal Association (then known as DrupalCon Inc.) hired Neil Kent and Megan Sanicki, two employees dedicated to DrupalCon and helping to grow the support programs we offer the community. Since then we have expanded our staff, offered new programs, and continued to build a strong Association to support the ever growing Drupal community. I'd like to take this time to reflect on the past year of growth and the challenges we still face.

Reflecting on our past accomplishments

501c3 Status

An accomplishment that every member of the Drupal Community should be proud of. The Drupal Community is now supported by a 501c3 non-profit organization. Although many may not care about the tax deduction that comes with this status what is important is the significance. Open Source Projects looking to obtain 501c3 status are heavily scrutinized and in the past several years only a few projects have been able to obtain this status. 501c3 status demonstrates that the Drupal Association and the Drupal project are rightfully and legally recognized to be projects operated and held in the public interest. We, the people in the Drupal Community, have always known this fact but now it is easier to help others understand what we are building together.

Drupal.org Redesign

Early in 2011 the Drupal Association funded several project managers and developers to finish the work on the Drupal.org redesign. Not only a much needed aesthetic refresh, the redesign opened up doors for increased collaboration and added new features such as SOLR search, new project pages, zip-file downloads, and more.

Migration to Git

The Drupal Association funded a community-led project to shift away from CVS for the Drupal code repository. Migrating to Git has improved developer collaboration, provided better developer tools, and engaged more developers in the Drupal project. Currently over 12,000 developers have Git accounts on Drupal.org making Drupal one of the most active Open Source projects. Absolutely amazing.

Infrastructure

A steady year over year budget was established to support the infrastructure of drupal.org. This budget supports annual hardware upgrades, necessary work to maintain the high uptime and availability on drupal.org, and collaboration with OSUOSL.

DrupalCon

One of our most significant activities DrupalCon is the leading conference for the Drupal Community. Each DrupalCon is a family reunion where we gather to learn about Drupal, share knowledge, and help to educate new people about Drupal and our community. In 2011 we welcomed nearly 5,000 people to DrupalCon and we plan to host over 6,000 attendees worldwide in 2012 as we expand to three conferences; North America, Europe, and South America/Asia-Pacific.

Much of our work has been behind the scenes creating relationships with suppliers, targeted investments, and improving our processes. The combination of these has saved the community tens of thousands of dollars and allowed our conference to continue to be one of the least expensive Technology conferences. With a ticket price under $400 there are few conferences that rival DrupalCon.

A few of the most relevant changes to our conference include:

• Free admission for speakers
• Volunteer program including complimentary and half-price admission
• Discounted tickets for students and non-profits
• Expanded scholarship program
• Sprint leadership program

DrupalCon also invested in the Drupal Conference Organizing Distribution (CoD) and continues to make contributions to it.

Governance

As stewards of the Drupal Community entrusted with donations, membership fees, and revenues from our various programs it is important that our governance model properly reflect the values of our community. Spending nearly a year the Association revamped its governance model to provide the support it needs for growth while also opening new doors for participation. If you haven't yet take a few minutes to learn more about these changes.

You are a part of our governance model and to that end we are committed to releasing our board meeting minutes and holding regular Town Hall Meetings to listen and learn from the commmunity.

New Programs

With the inclusion of staff we began to slowly expand our program offerings to better support the community and educate the world about Drupal. Here are just a few of the new programs we've created in the past year:

• Fiscal Sponsorship of DrupalCamps (US and Belgium)
• Community Cultivation Grants
• Drupal.org Improvements
• Bizconnect
  • http://association.drupal.org/bizconnect
• CxO Events
• Membership Benefits

Continual Improvement

As we build strong programs we recognize that we still have a long way to go. There is a lot that happens behind the scenes here at the Association and much that needs to come out from behind that curtain. Improving our communication is a top priority for us.

Volunteer program

We are blessed to be supported by such a great community. Many of you have stepped forward and offered your time, skills, and talents to help us push forward new inititiatives. Unfortunately too often many of you have been told to wait or you felt ignored. For those in this state of limbo please know that we are working on improving how we work with our volunteers. We want you all to be successful in the programs or initiatives that you lead with the Drupal Association. In order for that to happen we need to first build a solid foundation to provide support and coordination for your work. Please stick with us as we build this foundation.

How do we pay for these initiatives?

Like all companies we do have to get to the down n' dirty of paying staff, the utility bills, and all the necessary bits to keep the lights on. So where does this money come from?

To date the breakdown of our 2011 revenues looks like the following (you can read more about our 2009 and 2010 financials in our annual report and I provided a similar breakdown in my talk at DrupalCon London) .

As you can see the breakdown slants our revenues heavily towards DrupalCon ticket sales and sponsorships. Our staff works on all initiatives equally including DrupalCon so currently there is a strong reliance on DrupalCon in order to fund all of our initiatives. For those of you that are close to the Drupal Association you may have heard the term Revenue Diversification, I'd like to expand on this topic as it is essential and important to the strengthening of our Association.

Revenue Diversification

Building and strengthening new streams of revenue away from DrupalCon will strengthen the  Association and support the Drupal community through the next several years. Reducing the pressure on DrupalCon to produce a profit will allow us to expand our DrupalCon scholarship programs, speaker programs, volunteer programs, and discounts. We want DrupalCon to be inclusive and operate at the lowest cost, in order to do that we must seek additional forms of revenue to fund the various programs that we are building.

Currently we are expanding revenues in three primary areas; Memberships, Annual sponsorships, and Advertising. 

Memberships

Vitally important to our organization and to the community we want to see a strong membership program that helps to fund the various initiatives. This year we have seen strong growth in our membership program - to date we have added 700 individual members and 375 organization members. This brings our total numbers to:

Individual Members: 1,511
Organization Members: 699

Although this is great growth we would like to see these numbers grow significantly in order to become a primary source of revenue for the Association. I will expand on this initiative in a follow-up blog post.

Annual Sponsorships

Partnering with many of our companies we are developing an Annual Sponsorship program outside of DrupalCon that provides opportunities for companies to support the Association and our many initiatives on an annual basis.

Advertising

With the permission of the Drupal Community the Drupal Association has begun to market and sell contextual and relevant advertising on drupal.org. These advertising spots are minimal and only provided with the permission of the community. Our goal is to place relevant advertising on drupal.org that helps to grow a robust business ecosystem, fund the operations of the Drupal Association, and to stay out of the way of the Drupal community. This means that advertisments are strategically placed in locations that will be highly relevant and useful to the average visitor of the page.

For example: http://drupal.org/hosting is a page frequented by a handful of visitors who are looking for a great host for their Drupal webpage. Listing great hosts helps those new to Drupal have a great first impression with our project. This is a win-win-win situation. Those new to Drupal find a great host, the host gains a new client, and the community gains funds to help pay for new initiatives.

Read more about our advertising program.

Wrapping up

Looking back at our first year as a staffed organization we have made some great strides but we still have a long way to go. Increasing our communication and transparency, expanding our revenue streams, and working closer and tighter with the Drupal Community are all current initiatives that we are working on. Stay tuned as we grow and expand!