The mission of the Drupal Association is to foster and support the Drupal Project, the community, and its growth. Our very first task in accomplishing that mission?

1. Maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure of Drupal.org and other community sites.

Drupal.org is the central nervous system for the Drupal Project. It's where you work, where you share, and where you socialize. Everything that happens in the community touches D.O at some point. That's why it's first on the list of ways we serve our mission.

While the mission of the Drupal Association is broad, the organization came into being around the needs of the DrupalCons, and DrupalCons require a lot of care and feeding. Over the last several years, we've invested a lot in DrupalCons because they serve so many parts of our mission, and because they generate revenue that helps serve the project, including D.O. As the DrupalCons have grown in complexity and professionalism, we've grown our staff to support them. That means that today we have a very hard working staff of nine folks, and six of them spend all or much of their time focused on the Cons and will continue to do so.

The simple fact of the matter is that Cons take a tremendous amount of work to produce and generate relatively small returns for the huge investments we make. In other words, we can't fully fund D.O and our other mission-related work through Cons alone.

We're committed to continuing DrupalCons because they serve the Project and our community in many meaningful and invaluable ways. But, we'll have to find other ways to support our other Project-related work. For example, today, we have just two staff focused on D.O and we know we need a much more robust team to not only meet the baseline needs of D.O, but to drive the kinds of improvements that our community would like to see. Our vision is for a full time CTO, senior developer, two associate developers, a community lead, and contract services for UX/UI and graphic design. This dedicated D.O team will cost over $500,000 a year- an expense that is not currently funded.

That's why revenue was the topic of the second day of our board retreat. We need to find revenue sources for the DA that can help us fund this team, deliver real value to our community, and require much less effort than DrupalCons to produce. 

Our proposal to the board covered two main areas: Refining existing programs and identifying new ones. Over the next year, we'll be working with our Supporting Partners and sponsors to ensure that our existing programs serve the community and meet sponsor needs. We'll also launch some community surveys and interviews to understand membership and how we might revamp that program. And, we'll begin to explore two new possibilities.

Content Marketing on Drupal.org

I think we can all agree on a few points when it comes to Drupal.org. The site is meant to support the community, which is made up of many personas: Developer, site builder, themer, site owners, content editors, CMS evaluators and more. Yet, D.O doesn't provide an easy path for each persona to follow, making it hard for them to learn, adopt, engage, and give back.

And, Drupal.org could use some sprucing up. In other words, D.O could be a much better marketing platform for the Project by attracting new community members and accelerating the Drupal adoption rate.

We think we have tremendous opportunity to learn how to serve these markets, while also creating revenue that serves the Project. Governance permitting, we'd like to work with the community to create landing pages - like drupal.org/sitebuilder - that aggregate existing and new content and resources to suport the full lifecycle of each persona. 

Developing and designing these pages will allow us to learn about how to meet the needs of these audiences and drive SEO through excellent content creation. Over time, as we increase the value of these pages, we can also generate revenue for the Project through relevant and contextual ads. The image here is a simple representation of what one of these content-driven landing pages *might* look like. (Note: This is not fully fleshed out since we need to collaborate more with the community.)

As we learn from this first landing page, we can create others such as /developer, /contenteditor and /evaluate and even industry specific landing pages for evaluators like  /government and /nonprofit.

Talent Marketplace on Drupal.org

Currently, D.O provides little to no leadership around Drupal talent except for the less than adequete jobs board on Groups.Drupal.org. We can solve this by creating a talent marketplace on D.O. A smart investment in talent-related content and tools will allow us to help connect our talented community of developers, designers, project managers and others with the opportunities that are out there. And, this section will provide content leadership by sharing insightful articles on "how to get a job in Drupal", "how to attract and retain talent", and "how to mentor and grow your own talent in-house". 

Recruitment is an ongoing challenge for shops and the recruitment firms they work with and is another area where we can create revenue for the Project and better serve the community.

Our Guiding Values

Though we are working to create new revenue programs, we recognize that all the revenue in the world is for naught if it alienates the community, the people we are supposed to serve. So, as we develop these programs, we'll be looking to you for guidance and feedback. And, we'll do it all with these values in mind:

  1. Serve the Community First
  2. Don't Sell Out the Community
  3. Offer Services that Meet Needs

It's our job to serve you well, and it's your job to tell us when we're not. So let's start now. Tell us what you think of these ideas and our direction.

Flickr photo: starryeyez024

Comments

seanberto’s picture

Okay, so, I'm not that lazy. But my point is that in addition to the comprehensive and value-add fundraising efforts above, I think that many organizational members wouldn't notice, and most would easily tolerate, increasing our annual dues across the board, or providing more equitable, tiered membership levels. Our shop's grown from 2 to 9 staff over the last two years, but our organizational membership costs have been the same from the beginning. Why should my developers pay the equivalent of $11/year/staff when individuals are paying $30/year?

Should our company proactively reach out to the D.A. to look for optional donation opportunities to augment our current membership dues? Of course! But will I remember to do so as a shop owner? Probably not. I'm a Democrat, darn it. Tax me.

cweagans’s picture

Alternatively, you could introduce different membership levels for both individuals and organizations. For organizations, have it be tiered on the number of people in the organization. For individuals, start it at $30/year and allow the user to set any price higher than that if they want to.

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Thanks Sean and Cameron! Appreciate your support! We are definitely going to look at membership and how we can build a model that makes membership as accessible as possible and also allows folks to contribute more if they want! Keep an eye out for ways to share your two cents and help us create something great.

lisarex’s picture

Good idea to create landing pages that inform our other visitors, tailored to their needs. It's also an opportunity to go through existing content and tidy it up. Looking forward to helping out with the planning and execution!

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

We appreciate your support and offer of help! It takes a village to raise a web site!  :)

robya’s picture

I'm not a great contributor myself but I thought that I could share my opinions on this topic.

I see a plenty of opportunities to monetize drupal.org without going against the key values of our community.

 

Just a few ideas that crossed my mind:

 

Job & Career Market

  • A Job Market inside the Marketplace (in d.o)  or as a separate Menu item would allow to cumulate all the (multiple) Job  offerings across the whole d.o (especially g.d.o) sites into one place
  • The Organizations who post those offers should have no problem to donate/pay a little to have this opportunity.
  • Resumes from Job Seekers could be for free.
  • There are already some distributions (Drop Jobs) available that could Help to get something like this started.

 

Donations

  • You should place your donation Button(s) on d.o (which site has more visitors d.o or a.d.o?)
  • create & establish a standardized site-wide donation system for Module developers/maintainers, groups and so on

 

Training & Certification

  • you could/should create & establish an training & certification program
  • either alone or with a Joint Venture (acquia, drupalize.me, ...)
  • would help people to get faster to grip with drupal (education/training)
  • would allow developers to show their skill-sets and be recognized for it (certification).
  • monetization depends on solution (joint venture or not)
  • there are also some distributions available (ELMS) that could help in setting up something like this.

 

Module Development

  • If a Site wide Donation System would be in place:
    Module developers/maintainers could activate donations for different issue categories (bug fixes, feature request, ... ) to get things done faster
    They still do their job as usual but if someone is in a hurry he/she could be ready to pay something to get an issue prioritized.
    Module developers/maintainers could insert some kind of estimation in an issue as how much it would cost to fix/solve this issue.
  • Module developers/maintainers could activate donations for support & consulting solutions (packages) (maybe also in some form of marketplace)
  • a.d.o could get some percentages from this donations

 

Apps and/or Features

  • create & establish a Marketplace for Apps and/or Features
  • dual model (free and paid Apps)
  • paid Apps are the same as the free Apps but only combined with a support package (faster response times, direct contact, ...)
  • a.d.o could get some percentages from this paid Apps

 

I know that most of this suggestions are not something that can be realized over night but I think that almost all of this suggestions could/would help to get some money into your revenue stream and would also help the community in general.

 

None of this suggestions would alienate the key values of our community since everything stays still open source.
Only additional services are offered for a price and would also allow members to monetize some of their efforts.

 

I love the drupal community as it is and I don't want my suggestions to be misunderstood.
I don't want that our community should become a pay for everything community. These suggestions are only to enhance the status quo and give both the drupal association and also the developers some form to monetize their hard work and to build more and better software or in case of the drupal association build a better community infrastructure.

 

Robert

 

 

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Robert -

Thank you so much for that amazing post! So many great ideas in there! The best thing about this community is that you all care enough to spend THAT MUCH time and energy thining about how to make the community better.

W're definitely on top of your jobs suggestion. We'll be working on that later in 2013 for a 2014 launch. We definitely intend to build it out so that is a true career center, and not just job listings, but we'll be coming to you for feedback and advice as we do so. We know it will only work if it provides real value to everyone.

As for your other ideas - those are all on our radar as well. The DA can and should be doing lots more to support the community. If all goes well, and we get this content marketing strategy down right, we'll be able to put the technical and community staff in place that can support some of these other ideas. 

Thanks again,

Holly

robya’s picture

Hi Holly,

the Career Center Idea sounds really great. I hope that it will help to get the job offers clutter that is happening in g.d.o out of the way.

One of the next things that should be high on the list  are either the training & certification or the site-wide donation standard. I think both of this ideas would allow you to produce more revenues and also both of them would be a great enhancement to our community (especially the training & certification part).

Dries set out the message that Drupal should get a greater share on the worldwide CMS market. To accomplish this we need a proper education and certification track. There are lots of sites out there who offer web based training material but the difficulty for a newcomer into the Drupal universe and also for the seasoned developer is to select the right material in the right order. Also since Drupal is evolving so fast many of the materials out there are not up to date. Same is true for the documentation on d.o.(but it's getting better there)

A standardized training & certification program would be a great way to get more developers interested and committed to Drupal. Especially with Drupal 8 on the way with its Symfony parts where we could get many new developers from this community attracted to Drupal. But they will only stay if they can get up to speed fast.

Most people who give up on Drupal are doing so because they see a too steep learning curve or sometimes also called learning cliff. I really don't understand why this must be this way. Drupal is not rocket science and if we had a proper education program in place I think our user base could grow much faster.

With a certification program for end-users, site-builders, developers, designers, administrators or devops you would also have a never ending revenue stream that would help the Drupal Association to grow and therefor the whole Drupal Community.

As an example I just want to mention the Project Management Institute (PMI). Not everything there is perfect and we don't/shouldn't need to do everything like them but they finance the whole thing primarily from the memberships and the certifications (and renewals). And they started primarily only with documenting & starting a standard for Project Management. I Think that you can find some inspiration on this site regarding training, certification and also for your career center.

 

The Acquia Training Program is also a good starting point but more directed to classroom training and their own products. Nevertheless maybe a good starting point for a joint venture.

 

Drupalize.me is also a great side that would be a good partner for a web based training and certification track.

 

I Hope that my ideas and sugestion are not too far of and that I could show why I think that this is really something that you should look into and try to implement sooner than later.

 

Thanks for all your great work,

 

Robert

holly.ross.drupal’s picture

Hi Robert - 

Such a thoughtful reply! Rest assured that certification is on our agenda - just not first. It's a big investment up front and we're not quite in a place where we can make that yet.

H