The ROI of Giving Back
levelos
There is much talk of organizations giving back within our community, especially these days as the community struggles to muster the resources to complete Drupal 8 before the next ice age hits. Not to detract from the creative innovations underway to increase incentives, like organization credit on Drupal.org, but I’d argue that the incentives for an organization that’s adopting Drupal to give back to the community are inherent and even the term “giving” is misleading and part of the problem. An organization with a vested interest in Drupal is making an investment, plain and simple. Altruism is not part of the equation.
ThinkShout has built it’s reputation on its open source contributions, and a key part of our value proposition to clients is to not only build their sites on widely adopted open source code bases, but to abstract and release any customizations that come out of our engagements with them. Sure, this sometimes leads to higher upfront costs, but the investment is well worth it. In this talk, we’ll use a case study approach to analyze the return organizations have seen on their Drupal investments. In addition, we’ll discuss how those investments have, in turn, benefited the Drupal community and other organizations leveraging Drupal. The contributions we’ll cover include:
- The Salesforce Suite
- RedHen, a native Drupal CRM
- RedHen Raiser, a peer-to-peer fundraising platform
- MailChimp and Mandrill
- Leaflet