Drupal 8 has left small non-profits behind... How can we fix that?

My colleague, Elliot, recently wrote a controversial article called "Drupal sucks at non-profits," which led to some really great discussion in the comments. The general consensus is that Drupal 8 is great for big nonprofits (and big organizations in general) but has left the little guy behind.

Drupal used to be AWESOME for small nonprofits... How can we make it awesome again?

This is something we've been discussing internally for a long time, and we'd like to take a stab at a possible solution with the help of the community and some adventurous nonprofits.

In fact, we'd like to offer a FREE migration to Drupal 8 for 10 nonprofit organizations :-)

But, we'll get to that a little later! First, I'd like to dig into why the current situation kinda sucks...

Drupal 6 & 7 were awesome for nonprofits!

At myDropWizard, we provide support and maintenance for Drupal sites. We don't generally build new sites, we provide killer support for sites that are already live, including Long-Term Support for Drupal 6 sites.

A strong plurality of our customers are nonprofits, most of them on Drupal 6.

And Drupal 6 was a great choice for nonprofits, both from a technical perspective and the commercial and community eco-system built around Drupal at the time!

The TRUE power of Drupal isn't from Drupal core, but from:

• The 38,158 contrib modules. Want to add some new functionality to your site? "There's a module for that!"
• The community. You're only a Google search, or Meetup away from the solution to any Drupal problem.
• The commericial eco-system. The are (or were) loads of freelancers and small Drupal shops willing to help out small nonprofits. In fact, many professional Drupalists originally came from community organizing or activism or education or other places spiritually aligned with small nonprofits.

If you were pretty tech literate (but not necessarily a programmer), it was possible to mash together a workable site (with pretty advanced features!) geared specifically to the mission of your organization, for a reasonable amount of cost and effort for a small nonprofit.

Ah, the old days :-)

Why does Drupal suck for nonprofits now?

I love Drupal 8. As a developer, I'd much rather write code for Drupal 8 than previous versions.

It fixed a number of old architectural problems and set us up for some really cool things down the road. Drupal 8 is (going to be) awesome.

Drupal 8 is the future of Drupal!

But...

There's a number of problems right now, and they have a particularly chilling effect on the use of Drupal 8 at small nonprofits.

Like I mentioned above, a strong plurality of our customers are nonprofits on Drupal 6. As they upgrade their sites, they are NOT moving to Drupal 8! They're either going to Drupal 7 or, more frequently, away from Drupal entirely.

And we're not the only ones that see this. There were some really amazing comments on our last article, and I highly recommend reading them, but I'll summarize the main points below...

Drupal 8 is released! But kind of still under development...

Our vendor is a 40+ person shop and when they were delivering the site to me we had to fight to get some of the basic stuff that D8 promises out of the box (e.g. in-place editing, simplified admin, testing, etc) because it is not as stable as you hope...

- Krugs on "Drupal Sucks at Non-profits"

Drupal 8.0.0 was finally released November 19, 2015, but in a lot of ways, it was not a finished product. There's lots of really great new ideas in core, but many of them haven't really matured yet.

Now, I'm not saying we should have kept working on it until it was more polished - someone needed to draw a line and say, "it's usable enough in some cases, let's get it out!"

But using it in production requires someone to support it who can debug hard problems, watch the issue queue, apply patches, do upgrades, etc.

Of course, this is EXACTLY the sort of thing you'd hire a support and maintenance company like myDropWizard to do, and we try to make our services as affordable as possible, but this is still outside the reach of many nonprofits.

The contrib space isn't there yet

There are some cool stuff around the paragraphs module and the contrib media is getting there, nicely... with lots of patches, spit, composer prayer and symfony meditation...

- Davy Jones on "Drupal Sucks at Non-profits"

Building a Drupal site used to be like putting some lego blocks (modules) together, configuring and sprinkling just a smidge of custom code.

While there has been loads of progress on porting modules to Drupal 8, or creating completely new and interesting ones, it isn't yet like the old days.

Even a year and half after release, to build a Drupal 8 site, you'll find yourself helping to port modules, applying several patches from the issue queue and writing far more custom code than you used to.

Many small nonprofits don't have the additional resources or expertise to do this.

The knowledge base isn't there yet

What used to be a helpful, supportive place is becoming more and more commercialized, with more and more essential information being withheld unless people are paid to divulge it.

- Chris Brown on "Drupal Sucks at Non-profits"

When I need to do something I've never done in Drupal 8, first, I'll "google" it. Not infrequently, a great series of tutorials will come up... unfortunately, they were written in 2013 (before 8.0.0 was released) and totally irrelevent on current Drupal 8. :-(

While this situation is improving and there's some great material out there, the core of the problem is that most of our community (even those who used to be the most knowledgable) haven't gotten totally up-to-speed on Drupal 8 yet.

It's a bootstrapping problem. How can Drupalistas help at meetups, answer questions on Stack Exchange or write awesome blog articles on how to use Drupal 8 when most are still learning it themselves?

This will fix itself in time, but for now, it's very hard for small nonprofits with limited resources to learn how to do things on their own.

Drupal was never the easiest or cheapest, but Drupal 8 is worse

Composer may be technically superior and future proof but unless they can pull off some magic software tricks it's not going to work for shared web hosting environments that most local non-profits (and individual users such as myself) use.

- Frank Kelly on "Drupal Sucks at Non-profits"

What will get you a toy castle easier and faster? A complete plastic castle with a couple moving parts (but is mostly fixed in place)? Or a sack of legos that can be made completely dynamic?

That analogy may be the result of spending all my free time playing with my daughters, but I think it pretty accurately describes what makes Drupal so hard to use.

If you haven't guessed: Drupal is the sack of legos. :-)

Drupal has a steep learning curve, it has special hosting requirements (I'd argue even Drupal 6 & 7 shouldn't be hosted on cheap shared hosting that isn't optimized for Drupal), and needs special care with long-term support and maintenance.

And Drupal 8 pushes further in that direction.

It's more complex. You may have been able to get away without using Varnish and Redis and SOLR and Drupal-optimized hosting in Drupal 6 or 7, but certainly not with Drupal 8. With Drupal 8, support and maintenance needs to be a lot more proactive (we know - that's what we do!).

Nonprofits have been successful with Drupal 6 & 7 in the past in spite of these challenges, but the increased challenge with Drupal 8 may have raised the barrier too high.

The commercial eco-system has moved up market

Who was that famous guy who said, "Drupal 8 is for AMBITIOUS SITES?" It was none other than Dries Buytaert the founder of Drupal. Just google "Ambitious Drupal Sites" and see everyone competing for the keywords and trying to prove that THEY can build your next ambitious project.

- Doug Vann on "Drupal Sucks at Non-profits"

At DrupalCon New Orleans, Dries, the Drupal project lead, chose a very diplomatic way to describe how Drupal's commercial ecosystem has moved upmarket. Rather than saying "Drupal is for the enterprise", he said "Drupal is for AMBITIOUS digital experiences."

I disagree with Dries, but I'll address that in full in a future article.

It's definitely true that Drupal's commercial ecosystem has moved up market. You used to be able to find lots of freelancers and small shops, who were interested in working with smaller organizations on smaller projects. However, many of the freelancers I know have gone on to work at big shops and many of the small shops have grown or merged with other shops. And they are looking for big projects.

This doesn't just affect Drupal 8 - it's harder for smaller organizations to find help with Drupal 7 too. But certainly makes it much harder for any small nonprofit who was successful with Drupal 6 to move to Drupal 8.

The world is changing!

Meanwhile very small non-profits with mostly volunteer labor simply do not have the resources to maintain a Drupal site or to pay someone market rate to do so. They may be better served with Wordpress and/or a turnkey SaaS solution. [emphasis added]

- Dave Rudderman on "Drupal Sucks at Nonprofits"

It used to be that the expectation -- not just in nonprofits -- was that you'd buy some server or hosting somewhere that would handle your e-mail, your website, some other tech services, and hire somebody to build you a custom website.

In this day and age, there are organizations that only have a Facebook page. Or put their blog on Medium. Or, built their site themselves with a SaaS site building tool like Wix or Squarespace.

Your organization has a specific mission. That's really what you care about.

Why would you want to maintain a server, or install software? Especially software as complex to maintain as Drupal?

Some small nonprofits may look at the cost/benefit and decide that they don't need something like Drupal for their web presense.

So, what do nonprofits really want?

As I mentioned above, a good portion of our customers are nonprofits. I've also done Drupal projects for nonprofits as a consultant and Elliot has served on the boards of several nonprofits.

We've learned a few things about what they want:

• They want their web presense to reflect the nature of their organization and their mission. I think this is why Drupal has been so successful with nonprofits in the past: it can be customized so extensively. Apps like Wix or Squarespace that can sometimes work pretty well for small businesses, don't quite fit for nonprofits.
• They want as few "tech things" as possible. Some organizations are happy to have seperate tools for everything, for example: Drupal for a website, Mailchimp for e-mail marketing, external CRM, etc. But there is a strong tendency among nonprofits to want it all in one.
• Their CRM is hugely important. Many of our customers use CiviCRM, and while its integrations with the website are super important, the CRM itself is frequently more critical to them than their website. This was driven home by Kevin Reynen on "Drupal Sucks at Nonprofits"
• They don't really want to deal with hosting/servers. We've discovered that it's super difficult to get customers off of their hosting or custom server setup, even when we offer to do the migration for free (which we do :-)). But that's just inertia - they don't really want to deal all that mess.
• The most critical needs of most charitible nonprofits are very similar. Elliot talked about this on "Drupal Sucks at Nonprofits" but this includes things like: volunteer coordination, accepting donations, events, news, mapping, communicating with their constituents, etc. Many of the customizations that our customers have developed for their sites are the same fundimental features, even if they are implemented in different ways.
• They want to predictably budget how their tech dollars are spent. Most nonprofits do have funding, but they need to be very careful with budgeting the money they have. They must focus the majority of it on their mission. Working with a Drupal shop is traditionally difficult to budget for because building certain features or fixing certain bugs may end up costing more to develop than expected -- the dark side of agile development.

How to make Drupal 8 awesome for nonprofits?

The only way to make Drupal 8 great for small nonprofits, is to start using it for small nonprofits.

Drupal is a "do-ocracy", and we have to start doing it :-)

Drupal 8 can provide the things that nonprofits need -- we just need to figure out a way to deliver them in a way that's accessible to nonprofits.

So, here is what we propose:

• We'll work with 10 adventurous nonprofits to create a Drupal 8 + CiviCRM distribution for charitable nonprofits (information on how to get involved below)
• The Drupal 8 + CiviCRM distribution will be Open Source and available to anyone who wants to set it up themselves
• We'll create a SaaS version which includes hosting and support so small nonprofits don't have to deal with setting up or installing or maintaining their site
• We'll migrate the 10 nonprofits in the BETA group from Drupal 6 and their old CRM to Drupal 8 + CiviCRM for FREE! We'll be talking about all the details of the BETA process later, but very quickly: the BETA itself won't be free (we'll be charging a monthly fee for the service), however, as an incentive to join the BETA we won't be asking for anything additional to do the migration. This is significant: migrations to Drupal 8 can be super expensive - a cost of thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for a migration is not uncommon.

There's a community side to this: we'll be improving Drupal 8 and CiviCRM and various contrib and making all of it available as Open Source. Other vendors and Drupalista's and individual nonprofit organizations who have technical resources are welcome to take advantage of what we create and contribute if they like.

And there's also a commercial side: we hope to provide a path for our customers to stay with Drupal rather than switching to something else. And, we want to be able to offer the SaaS version to smaller organizations that otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford our services.

Doug Vann wrote, "D8 was not built with Nonprofits in mind".

We're hoping that we can change that :-)

We want to create an Open Source "Wix for nonprofits"

In this article I sought to cover the the why of this project. The specific implementations of our proposed solution will be addressed in greater detail in another article. :-)

But, in short, the end goal is to create a hosted SaaS solution (based on Drupal 8 + CiviCRM), to allow nonprofits to build their own sites, for a low monthly fee.

So, in the end, it'll be as easy to use as other well known hosted solutions (like Wix) but with the additional features nonprofits need (like CRM, volunteer management, etc) with a price accessible to small nonprofits.

However, to be super clear:

• At launch, we won't have something as simple and easy to use as our end goal - much development needs to be done
• The members of the BETA group will be paying more than the eventual super low price point. While the sites won't be completely custom they will be built to their needs, fully supported (the way we support and maintain our customer sites currently) and allow for adding things outside our standard platform

So, while the ultimate goal is to have something that even very small nonprofits could use, it's going to take us a little while to get there.

We'll need the help of some adventurous nonprofits - and not necessarily the smallest - in order to make that a reality!

Join the BETA and help us build it!

It's going to be a monthly paid BETA, and for a product that doesn't really exist yet, and so participating is a little risky. But here's what you get for taking that risk:

• We'll be building the platform to meet your most critical needs and you'll have a large influence in what it becomes
• We'll migrate the content from your old site and CRM to Drupal 8 and CiviCRM for FREE!
• You won't have to start making monthly payments until we launch your new site with all your data migrated over
• Even if the SaaS service flops, you can still export your site and take it somewhere else because it's all Open Source

So, if you're interested in your organization being part of the BETA or just want to stay in the loop, please fill out this simple form!

If we can't find 10 nonprofits for the BETA, we're not doing it

We've launched new products before and seen them both succeed and fail.

One of the biggest product building mistakes is spending loads of time building something and THEN trying to get people to use it. You end up finding out that you built all the wrong features and that no one would use it, let alone pay for it. :-)

So, we're only going to build it if we can find 10 nonprofits who will use it, help decide what goes in it, and pay for it. If it works for at least 10 customers AND it's good enough to pay for, well, we probably made something pretty good.

If you're interested, please click the big green button below to...

Join the BETA or get progress updates

We'll be digging deeper into the details in future articles, but please leave any comments or questions below!

Think it's a great idea? Or, even better - think it's a terrible idea? Leave a comment!