With the cancellation of DrupalCon, the main community event organized by the Drupal Association and scheduled for May of this year 2020, the Association suffered a severe financial setback since the event is the main source of funds that supports the services offered to the community.
Without a doubt, COVID-19 has put many sectors in trouble and non-profit organizations like the Association have not been the exception. As soon as it was decided to cancel the event for the safety of the attendees, the next question was how to proceed. was going to be able to obtain the resources to maintain the operation for the community which is made up of millions around the world, as mentioned by Heather Rocker, Executive Director of the Drupal Association.
The #DrupalCares campaign was launched by the Association team in the hope of raising the funds needed to cover the shortfall for the operation; a total of $500,000 was needed to achieve the goal. The response from the community was not long in coming and donations from $5 and up began to push the fundraiser, which was carried out on the Drupal.org community page.
Other initiatives gave him the additional push to start an accelerated collection, the #DrupalCares challenge launched by the founder of Drupal Dries Buytaert and his wife Vanessa was the first to give the first big push, the challenge was to achieve the greatest amount of individual donations or membership renewals up to a limit of $100,000, the amount raised would be tripled with a donation from the couple, this opened the possibility of reaching a potential of $300,000 in donations, again the community did not wait and began to see the donations from all over the world reflected, donations in which our team also participated by renewing memberships and with donations within their reach, we all added up little by little.
A second boost came later with initiatives such as that of Jeff Geerling who will donate 1 dollar for every "Like" of a video he published on YouTube , Jeff will donate up to a total of 1000 USD, that is, as soon as he reaches 1000 "likes". "We will have achieved the goal, by the way, today it is around 820, so you can still contribute a dollar by just giving a "Like."
Gábor Hojtsy also became actively involved and launched the initiative "the Drupal 9 module porting challenge" or in Spanish "the module migration challenge to Drupal 9" in which he would donate a total of 900 Euros to the 100 projects that migrated their modules to Drupal 9 from that moment on, Ron Northcutt joined the initiative and offered another 900 Euros, Ofer Shaal with 450 Euros and QED42 with another 900 Euros. More information on the migrated modules can be seen on Gabor's page . It has definitely been a great achievement for the community to transform a worrying situation into a huge opportunity for unity and collaboration with direct benefits for the platform.
Many more well-known companies in the Drupal ecosystem, including more globally recognized companies such as Google, joined forces and made significant donations that increased the number of donations. This broad response from the companies, in addition to reflecting their great commitment to the community, revealed a very notable aspect of Drupal, which is that it has very solid and committed corporate support.
SeeD, as a company widely dedicated to Drupal, also, in addition to the individual support of our collaborators and the annual renewal of membership as a Supporting partner to the Drupal Association, donated a total of 1500 USD by not requesting a refund for the entrance tickets to DrupalCon, another way in which many smaller companies but with equal commitment also did our part.
For posterity, the Pixels for Drupal project will remain , which hopes to fill a space of One Million Pixels with all the donations made to DrupalCares, an initiative that would lead to the possibility that instead of raising only $500,000, one million will be reached. Dollars.
The DrupalCares initiative will still be open until May 31st and you can continue to contribute to the support of the community and the Association's initiatives from the initiative's page .
The association made a video of thanks for the community's great achievement, you can watch it on the association's official channel .
