I am posting to ask two questions regarding nonprofits, consultants and Drupal
shops, and the general direction Drupal is headed. In short, I'd like to
hear your thoughts on whether Drupal is heading in a direction that benefits
nonprofits or leaves many behind. I feel that I need a disclaimer: I'm asking
these questions because I don't know the answer and think some of you will have
great feedback that helps answer the questions, and more importantly improve
Drupal and its community.
-
Is Drupal development getting too expensive, and as a result, pricing many
smaller (Drupal entry level) NPOs out? -
Is the professionalization of Drupal -- more modules and themes being
developed by Drupal shops for paid jobs -- causing more modules, themes and
improvements to get back to the community and Drupal.org? Or, are more
and more improvements becoming for clients only?
On question one, I think most will agree with the premise that Drupal rates are
rising. I don't think this is wrong in any way. In fact, it is a good and
healthy sign for Drupal. It means that demand is high and that more people can
turn their Drupal hobby into a full-time commitment, which only improves the
Drupal product. I'm yet to encounter any "price-gouging" and even some of the
shops with higher end rates are well below many competitors using different or
custom tools.
I've seen the changes as I've moved from a freelance Drupal wannabe to the
client side, working for a decently sized organization. Two years ago, a
complex site with many chapters having their own space within the site was
priced at $20,000. The theme for this job was around 4,000 if I remember
correctly. Bids I received for a job of similar scale last year came in
between 25-50k for design and 30-60k for Drupal install, configuration, modules,
etc.
These increases reflect many changes besides just hourly rates going up.
For instance, most reputable shops will not just spit out a new theme for you.
They want to spend time understanding your goals, providing strategy insight,
measuring results, and further refining the design to meet those goals. They
have the capacity to do this now with larger and more specialized staff, and in
addition to wanting to give the client a good product, they wisely don't want to
stake their reputation -- they've worked hard to build up -- on a bad site.
There are likely some new shops that are in the same place the others were a
couple years ago that offer the drastically lower prices (I only received two
such proposals for a design bid, and their samples were little more than blue
marine with some style changes), but my sense is that the good independents get
snatched up by the larger shops after any DrupalCon -- so their original low
rates don't last.
So back to the question at hand: Do the higher rates leave many smaller and
local NPOs out of the Drupal revolution?
Maybe I should have put the questions in separate posts, but oh well. I think
the second question is open to lots of interesting feedback. Amazing sites
are being developed for high-profile clients like
MTV, US Weekly and the New York
Observer as a few examples as well as sites with unique features like MapLight. Does the work done for jobs like these improve Drupal, is it making it back in? My view is
that many are and more attention is paid to improving Drupal core because more
and more clients depend on it. However, I've also seen that many customizations
don't make it back, and others make it onto http://drupal.org/project/Modules in
stripped down versions lacking many of the features the client received. There
is good reason for much of this. A cool addition to flickr integration that let
users upload images related to events to flickr, and carried certain data from
the event node as flickr tags to help for sorting and map placement, never fully
got back to Drupal.org. We had a limited budget to pay a developer to quickly
come up with the solution, which meant hacking it to work with our site, but not
doing the extra work it takes to make the module work on any site. My guess is
that a lot of shops find themselves creating solutions that would take
significant out of pocket costs to put back into Drupal as modules. They just
don't have the resources for that.
Still, many shops like
Development
Seed explicitly invest in bringing improvements back to Drupal like the
il8n set of modules
and improvements to core. I'd be interested to hear from developers and clients
on what percentage of customization and improvements they work on come back into
Drupal.
One place I've been very disappointed with is the
installation
profiles. I thought the 5.0 install profiles addition would be a major boon
to Drupal. I thought many of the small orgs that were in danger of being priced
out would be able to use install profiles to easily launch a site, and focus
their limited resources on design and training. Yet the there are only 6
profiles available -- two of which are site configurations (wiki and for
churches) and the others are for translations. With so many shops providing
innovative configurations for clients, where are the install profiles to
match? No social networking, no membership based nonprofits, no newspaper,
no school. A focus on this could help close the price and usability gap,
benefiting NPOs and Drupal Shops of all sizes IMHO.
So that's my .02...well more .20 cents. Your thoughts? I'll close by saying that
Drupal has been an amazing tool for the nonprofit sector thus far and promises
much more. While budgets fluctuate, anyone willing to dive in and learn can get
their organizations site up, and quite likely find themselves with a new career
as a Drupal Ninga...sipping Kristal (or beer) in
Barcelona
this September.
Comments
Jason, I think you have some
Jason, I think you have some good points, but I think your missing some things too.
I think Drupal is becoming increasingly easy for the small DIY orgs. D5 was a big improvement in that direction, as are CCK, Views, and CiviCRM. The quality of contrib modules continues to improve overall, making it ever easier for small organizations to deploy their own sites. Drupal core is ever aware of the smaller sites when making changes to the code base. Nothing is committed that will make it more difficult for the small guy to deploy a site.
There is also good support for the larger non-profit organizations. At Advomatic, most of our clients fall into this category. And we contribute as many of our modules back as possible. Even if we can't bill to the client the costs of making a module flexible enough to run on any site, we'll often absorb that cost as being part of our contribution back to the Drupal community. Albeit there are still a large number of modules that are just too specific to a certain client's business model to be worth contributing back.
In regards to the solo consultants being snatched up by the larger development firms I think you have touched on a good point, however I think that gap will be filled as more fresh developers start their own consultancies. I foresee the combination of the recent Drupal books and Drupal's ever lowering "I rock" threshold, and the great work of the documentation team to be strong influences for this.
But until that happens, the mid-sized organizations will continue to be in a bind.
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
Canadian Office
Calgary Alberta Canada
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Worked as NP and now FP
I come from the nonprofit sector but have recently joined pingVision as Operations Manager. Having served as the Senior Director of Technology for a midsized nonprofit, I have some insight into the nonprofit sector and how technology intersects with it.
I think that the description made is apt across all technology. Just like in the for profit world, nonprofits come in all shapes and sizes ranging from all volunteer groups to huge nonprofits like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. In addition, nonprofits have a significant array of different IRS designations which help frame where revenues come from.
Just as many small LLCs may not be able to afford the top tier technology, the same is the case for small nonprofits. Each will assess its resources and determine what the priorities are. Just because a company is a nonprofit does not mean that the company isn't business saavy, nor does it mean the business can't make a profit. What it does mean is the business can not take profits and distribute those profits to share holders. Indeed, it is important for nonprofits to be run in a fiscally responsible way and make profits to contribute to reserves.
So just as higher prices may exclude small for profits, higher prices will also exclude some smaller nonprofits. However the entry bar to using Drupal is much lower than some other technologies, especially with the trainings being conducted by shops like Bryght, Lullabot, and RainCity.
How can the Drupal community help? I think that good corporate citizens should offer nonprofits some kind of discount on work regardless of what kind of business the vendor represents. This includes Drupal houses. This can make a huge difference as to whether the nonprofit can do business or not. Nonprofits exists, for the most part, for the betterment of the community as a whole--sounds a bit like the open source community doesn't it? In fact, just a few days ago I wrote a post paralleling issues that the Drupal community faces to those nonprofits face.
Long and short is this--the market will drive prices. Nonprofits have experienced this for quite some time. Good corporate citizens will give nonprofits a break to help them engage in their missions.
J. Matthew Saunders
Operations Manager
pingVision LLC
Good points; pooling resources
I think you make good points, and it's something that concerns me even as I try to make a living in a Drupal shop collective. Those of us making money in Drupal, even more importantly than giving back time, have to try to promote Drupal development that helps organizations pursuing justice meet their needs for free or cheaply.
One big thing, though, I ask of the nonprofit world: co-ordinate with each other! There are common needs, that if several larger and medium sized organizations pooled the resources many now sink into proprietary solutions, could fund the development of superior free software solutions.
Event management/ticketing is one area I've had a proposal out for quite a while (and my real goal even there is to work toward tools for volunteer self-management); even Agaric's auction module would greatly benefit if just one other group wanted to use it and pitch in about $500 (for making it public-ready) instead of giving the same or more to the corporate take-a-cut auction sites; and the vast resources being spent on Raiser's Edge and its many runners-up sickens me when I think what that money could mean for CiviCRM development.
So if tools to help aggregate the needs of nonprofits and progressive groups are needed, let's have those tools pointed out or let's develop them.
~ ben melançon
member, Agaric Design Collective
http://AgaricDesign.com - "Open Source Free Software Web Development"
benjamin, agaric