Drupal becoming a major force in the NFP CMS market

SEP

Drupal gaining momentum in NFP Sector

02 SEP 2011 | Posted in charity, CMS, membership organisation, NFP, open source, website | Author Alex McLachlan |

4 Comments

The open source CMS Drupal is being adopted by more and more NFP organisations. I recently did a comparison of the charities and membership organisations using Drupal and two of the more popular commercial CMSs. I was surprised by the level of market penetration by Drupal. I was able to find dozens of sites that use Drupal. When I tried the same for the two commercial CMSs, I had great trouble finding more than a handful.

Good examples of Drupal sites include Oxfam International, Comic Relief, the Actuarial Profession, Amnesty International, the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and Greenpeace to name but a few.

This is not to say that it’s all a one-way street in the Drupal direction. A recent website tendering process I ran for a membership organisation selected the .Net CMS Sitecore. The choice depends on the strength of the proposed project and the cultural fit between client and supplier.

The main benefits of Drupal (in addition to being free) are that it is functionally extremely rich and there's a large selection of companies who can carry out the work, as demonstrated by the sell out attendance of nearly 2,000 at last week’s DrupalCon London.

The disadvantages are that Drupal's flexibility can mean that it can take more effort to configure than the more constrained .Net CMSs and its success has led to a high demand for experienced Drupal developers.

Comments

Russell Franks (not verified)
26 Sep 2011 10:43

We are coming across a desire to use Opensource more and more, sometimes this is because there is then the potential for a wider choice of development partners and sometimes it is because Joomla and Drupal are recognised names.

We provide a web services toolkit to link Drupal to iMIS so in our world this is a practical proposition from a technical perspective. My own thought is that there is a lot of "purist" nonsense talked when it comes to CMS solutions and in fact given that most CMS products (opensource or proprietory) will do what the average user needs to do, the decision should be made on other factors such as overall project cost, amount of customisation needed to create a solution, degree of productisation and upgradeability in the solution.

We chose to create our own CMS called vcGenius and we also work with the ASI CMS called WCM and while they dont have tens of thousands of users they do have the modules that not for profit sector clients actually need as standard components. Depending on the overall requirement, this can save an average client a small fortune compared with the cost of integrating opensource or non-integrated alternative proprietiory CMS products and also the inherant upgradeability can make the overall cost of ownership much lower than it would otherwise be.

Alex McLachlan
26 Sep 2011 20:40

Thanks for your comment Russell. I'm not fully familiar with all the details of your CMS and the companies that support it, so my comments are aimed CMSs in general.

Our advice is to always choose a CMS that is supported by multiple companies, preferably with an international installation base. The reasons for this are:

Alternative suppliers allow for multiple quotations for competition and alternatives should a switch of supplier be necessary (without needing a new CMS)
Features that are needed by a cross section of the user base are likely to be available in the CMS
With a large user base there will be sufficient commercial reasons to have a product roadmap and regular upgrades to the CMS will be available with new features

The consequences of the above is that we never recommend proprietary (single vendor) CMSs or bespoke content management systems to our clients.

Our experience is that all but the smallest company or NFP organisation will have significant requirements for their website. In the case of a company, this will often include an online shop; for an NFP organisation, a shop able to sell events, membership and other products, and often community features. In addition, mobile is becoming increasingly important, so the ability to provide content and services to mobiles is also becoming necessary.

Alice (not verified)
10 Oct 2011 14:26

As a web development studio who build many opensource sites for charitable clients (eg. http://www.bowarts.org = Drupal), we have found that one of the biggest selling points for systems such as Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress et all, is that the client can move to another development company if they wish to in the future. Although tying your clients into your own custom CMS system might seem like good business for you, the developer, we think it is actually a negative for the client. It is a huge commitment on their part. The fact that you can use Drupal or similar, which is ironed out to perfection by thousands of opensource developers/testers, and the client might already be familiar with using, is a bonus. But even better is if for whatever reason you decide to part ways in the future they can still find a developer to maintain or change the site. This is a selling point in their eyes and, although maybe it's nice to trap them into your custom CMS, it's actually a tick in your box at the outset. For example, we now help maintain two other Drupal websites that were originally built by another agency, but our clients were not happy with them and moved over to work with us instead.

Personally we find Drupal one of the best CMS systems, but I also think Wordpress is a very advanced and flexible option. Joomla is also great but very complicated and not user-friendly for the end client.

Alex McLachlan
10 Oct 2011 20:57

Interestingly, I know of a number of companies who used to have their own proprietary CMS solutions, but have moved to Drupal. This has often been at a major decision point, where a re-development was needed, or significant new features. And they came to the realisation that it is very difficult for proprietary systems to keep up with Drupal, or indeed the major commercial CMSs.

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