Stronger Together #DrupalCares

This year’s annual DrupalCon, which was planned to take place in Minneapolis, was canceled due to COVID-19 and this resulted in the Drupal Association losing a key source of annual fundraising critical to supporting the Drupal project and its growth.

Enter #DrupalCares, a global fundraiser conceived with the hopes of bridging the significant funding gap left as a result of the pandemic. While the campaign had a strong start, what put the fundraising into overdrive was the #DrupalCares match challenge, a $100,000 matching grant for individual contributions funded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and his wife Vanessa. Then a coalition of Drupal businesses came together to match those contributions again—bringing the potential impact up to $300,000. These contributions, together with the contributions from Drupal service providers and end-users, accelerated the campaign dramatically. 

The Drupal community members and the Drupal Association didn’t disappoint when a response was needed. 

Today, #DrupalCares has raised $500,000, meeting its 60-day goal in just over 30 days. Nearly 150 businesses and organizations, along with over 2,000 individual donors and members donated, to reach the goal in record time.

 

"I'm in awe of how quickly the Drupal community rallied to raise funds for the Drupal Association,” said Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal. “With this fundraising campaign behind us, the Drupal Association can refocus on key initiatives such as the Drupal 9 launch next month.” - Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead

 

Why does Vardot support the Drupal Association?

The Drupal Association is a special bond between innovative developers, designers, and agencies that have come together for a common cause, purpose, and vision.

Transparency, participation, and collaboration are the principles that the Drupal and open-source community are built on, and they are the most important principles to practice to ensure that we can overcome the challenges ahead as a community.

Those principles are why Drupal and Open Source will always be resilient, thrive, and be recession-proof.

For the past 10 years, Vardot has been able to build amazing digital experiences for organizations and brands around the world. Some of those organizations relied on Drupal to realize their missions like the UNRWA, USAID, and Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders.

Vardot’s success and growth were only possible because of the continuous vital support of the amazing Drupal community.

Our mission statement was to help contribute towards creating a digital world with infinite opportunities and possibilities for everyone using Drupal. We knew we couldn’t do it alone.

That is why we are members of the Drupal Association.

How does Vardot support the Drupal community?

With over 70 modules contributed and 100+ projects supported; Vardot has been a Drupal Association Support Partner and sponsor of the Promote Drupal Initiative for almost a decade now.

We have proactively sought to encourage and promote open-source by sponsoring and hosting Drupal and open-source functions, events, and meetups that always feature awareness programs regarding Drupal in addition to training workshops and sessions.

Some of our sponsorships include multiple meetups, DrupalCamps, user group events, DrupalCon Barcelona 2015, DrupalCon Dublin 2016, DrupalCon Vienna 2017, and Promote Drupal Fund.

Moreover, we have committed a segment of our time to contribute numerous Drupal modules free-to-use by the entire community. Our Drupal contributions have been downloaded over 250k times by the global open-source community.

As proud members of this great community, we have joined over 70 organizations by donating to the Drupal Association as an organization, and those who can contribute individually have also pledged their support through donations and/or renewing their memberships.

But, our support doesn’t stop there.

Rajab Natshah (@Rajab_Natshah), one of the community’s most active contributors and a lead software engineer at Vardot has to lead the effort to ensure that Varbase - one of the leading Drupal distributions and CMS is ready and tested for Drupal 9.

As things currently stand, Varbase readiness for Drupal 9 is solid in terms of the Varbase Core modules, and most of the popular modules used by the open-source community can be found packaged in Varbase distribution. We are sure that with the quickened pace of testing taking place that all popular Drupal modules will be tested and released as stable.

Also, we are excited to announce that we are in the final stages of launching a new tool that will be a strategic asset in the arsenal of any Drupal project delivery team or stakeholder - DrupalAudit.

DrupalAudit will enable you to audit the performance of your Drupal website in terms of SEO, security, accessibility, and much more.

About #DrupalCares

The #DrupalCares campaign is a fundraiser to protect the Drupal Association from the financial impact of COVID-19. Your support will help keep the Drupal Association strong and able to continue accelerating the Drupal project.

The #DrupalCares fundraising campaign remains active through May 31, 2020. To learn more about Drupal or make a donation, visit Drupal.org

About Drupal and the Drupal Association 

Drupal is the open-source content management software behind millions of websites and applications, boasting a community of 46,000-plus developers and more than 1.3 million users on Drupal.org. The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the Drupal software project, fostering the community, and supporting its growth. 

Please join us in supporting the Drupal Association by giving to #DrupalCares through individual donations, or joining the community as members.