Drupal & CiviCRM

Presentation for Social Source South West

David Moreton

Circle Interactive

February 5 2008

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Some questions you may have

What are they?

What can you do with them?

Are they really free?

Who uses them in the real world?

Where do I go from here?

What is Drupal?

Free Open Source Software
Drupal is released under GNU General Public Licence. That means the source code behind the software is freely available and any modifications to it must be released under a similar licence. To the end user, this means that you can be sure the system will remain free and continue to be supported by a community of developers who want it to remain that way.
Modular
Drupal is all modular so no two Drupal sites will be the same, since they will use different combinations of modules in different ways. Key parts of the functionality on offer is part of the core distribution - user management, content management, content classification, content syndication, templating and localisation. But this can be extended with hundreds of other modules such as forums, calendars, private messaging, profile extensions, views, polls, image galleries, multilingual support and integration with CiviCRM to name but a few!
A CMS construction kit
Drupal is not just a CMS, it's rather a platform on which to build your own custom site.
Powerful
Choosing the right combination of modules to rapidly deploy advanced functionality, combined with the hugely flexible user management system and its taxonomy system of content classification makes Drupal a hugely powerful system. Due to its modular nature, you can choose to harness whichever parts of that power, suit your purposes.
Accessible
Drupal uses standards-compliant methods such as XHTML, separation of content and layout through CSS and
clean URLs to make sites accessible and to improve search engine ranking.

What is CiviCRM?

A web-based, constituent relationship management solution.
It allows you to set up and track:

Contact Details
Communications
Activities
Relationships
Groups

What can you do with CiviCRM?

CiviCRM also has 4 important components that take it beyond a simple contact management system

civiMEMBER

CiviMember provides flexible membership management for your organization, along with convenient online signup and renewal. You can set up different membership levels and divide these between different parts of your organisation. For example by region. You can then allow people to sign up for the appropriate membership online and add their own details to your system.

civiEVENT

CiviEvent provides integrated online event registration and management for paid and free events. You can create your own event sigup pages with different levels of participation and track participants. It's easy to add custom fields for special requirements that you may need to offer, such as dietary requirements, disability access, etc. You can then search for participants by event, event type, participant role, etc. Users can export events as iCal files or subscribe to iCal feeds.

civiCONTRIBUTE

CiviContribute is an online fundraising and donor management component which enables you to track and manage contributions to your organization. These can be donations, membership dues, event fees, etc. You can automatically generate receipts, and track thank-you notes, and import and export contribution data to/from other systems like an accounting package. Past contributions are visible when viewing any contact record.

civiMAIL

CiviMail is a robust mass-mailing component which allows you to engage your constituents with personalized email shots and newsletters. You can target mailouts to CiviCRM groups and track open rates, click throughs etc.

What can you do with Drupal?

Maintain and edit a simple site
A simple installation of Drupal allows someone with little or no knowledge of html to maintain and edit a site. The TinyMCE editor gives WYSIWYG editing of content much like a word processor. Select some text, click on the B button and hey presto, your text has become bold.
Publicise your News and Events
A very simple events module puts your events into a calendar that you can share. Classify an item as news and see it appear in a block of recent news items on your front page and if that's not pushing it enough, you can also publish it through RSS to all your subscribers.
Publish a newsletter
The simple news module allows you publish a newletter, manage subscriptions to it and archive old issues with very straightforward configuration.
Organise your content in different ways
Some Content Management Systems force your content into a hierarchy. One of Drupal's key strengths is its taxonomy structure which allows you to classify your content in any way you like - and as many different ways as you like. A good example is that you can lable something with a colour (red, green, blue) and a size (big, medium, small). These can be hierarchical if you want (so blue could have subcategories of azure, cobalt, denim, navy, etc) or not. They can also be open ended, so you add to them as you go. In this case, when you start typing, the system will complete your word with suggestions that are already used. E.g. prussian.
Maybe a better example would be that you can classify your content by section (news/features/resources),
topic (sustainability/accessibility/funding)
access (public/subscribers/staff)
Which means your website can act as an intranet as well.
Interact with users through blogs, comments & forums
When you hear people talking about Web 2.0, they really mean getting your users involved in producing or reacting to content. Drupal has a powerful built in threaded comment feature that makes blogs and forums just work out of the box. With the fine-grained permissions that can be allocated to different user roles, it easy to allow registered users to do things like post to forums, comment on blogs, submit job vacancies, upload files and photos and much much more.
Create a Community, Campaign, Newspaper,...
Some great sites based on Drupal are these things and more. Greenpeace UK, Amnesty International, The UN's End Poverty and Fight Hunger sites all use Drupal as do some major newspapers like the New York Observer, Die Welt, Die Zeit and The Onion. Drupal even runs some sites at organisations as diverse as NASA, NATO and MTV; The Grateful Dead, Ozzy Osbourne and Britney Spears also use it. Here's a really good list of Drupal sites.
Produce a presentation - like this
This article is part of a presentation created for Social Source South West. Through the use of simple formatting, these full handout notes are available online but only the main points display in the slide show. You can view the actual presentation through this link.
Integrate with CiviCRM
There is a fairly simple integration between the two systems that allows your Drupal users to add their details to your CiviCRM database. It also allows you to expose parts of your CRM database through the Drupal web site so that people can search for details that you allow over the web. This level of tie in between the two systems provides a very powerful tool for your organisation to engage with, connect and activate your membership, constituents and supporters.

Are they really free?

What is the total cost of ownership?

Free Licence - Yes that's really £0

Planning Time - hours or days

Planning time can vary greatly depending on the scale of your project, your experience with the issues and technology and the size of your organisation. Don't forget to include meetings with key stakeholders at this stage.

Set-up and Configuration - your time/developer costs

Set up for a basic site is not that hard and both Drupal and CIviCRM do a lot of useful stuff out of the box. However, the default settings will not be to everyone's tastes and requirements, so some configuration will be required. Whether you decide someone on your team has the skills to do this or can take the time to learn, or you decide to bring in some outside help, this will likely be a large chunk of your budget.

Design - How long is a piece of string?

When thinking of design costs, people often refer to the question "How long is a piece of string?" Some of the templates (themes in drupal-speak) can be easily used to produce a simple, clean looking site with your logo and strapline to identify it as yours. Consider the costs of a full corporate identity overhaul from a top brand consultancy and you may not find a piece of string long enough.

Hosting Costs - £5 to £500 a month

Hosting costs will vary with reliability, amount of sharing involved, bandwidth, service levels etc. You should probably expect to pay between £10 and £50 a month. You can find deals for less than this if your requirements are low. You may already have a hosting package that will allow you to install Drupal and/or CiviCRM.

Some alternative systems have more specialist requirements. Plone requires the language Python to be installed which is more unusual than PHP and less often found on cheaper hosting deals. Similarly .NET hosting generally has higher overheads. The bottom line?

more than a simple site
less than many alternatives

Backups

Backing up your data uses disk space and bandwidth. Will you do this on your own network or pay someone to manage it for you? This may be covered in your hosting package, but you should check as some hosting companies charge a lot for managed backups.

Upgrades - your time/developer costs

Any software can develop potential security risks and so you have to consider upgrades and the amount of time needed to apply them. Drupal usually provides important security updates as patches that can be simply applied. Upgrading to a newer version often gives not just the patch but new features too. However, full upgrades can take hours to test and implement. This may be covered in your hosting package if you have chosen a specialist Drupal host - again you should check whether this is part of the deal or an additional cost.

Conclusion

Before embarking on any project, it's important to get an idea of the TCO. Free software may save you a considerable amount, deliver better results than proprietary solutions, and safeguard your investment for the future but there always some costs involved. Get them in your budget.

Who uses it in the real world?

Here are a few sites that hopefully show a wide range of different uses.

Where do I go from here?

Free download from drupal.org and civicrm.org

If you have technical capabilities in-house you can simply download the
latest version from the web. You will need to have PHP and MySQL
running on the machine where you plan to run the installation from.

Your web host

Some specialist web hosting companies offer pre-installed Drupal sites as part of their offering. In this case check that you are using the latest version.

Your web developer

If you are employing a web developer to build the site for you, they
will download and set up the latest version of Drupal for you.

Thank you

Full notes are available on www.circle-interactive.co.uk/presentations/drupal

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