I must admit I'm pretty excited about our upcoming Drupal for Non-profits class. Our primary mission has always been to help people get the resources they need to get a lot done. For that reason, most of our development work has been focused on mail, contact management, donation, and tracking tools to help people get their maximum benefit from their online resources. The cool thing about open source is, you can give it away and still have it for yourself, so after a customer helps to fund module or a feature, it's available for everyone.
Too often, the cost or complexity of hiring a professional consultant causes an organization to focus on keeping their costs down, rather than channeling their resources into empowering their volunteers, developers, community builders, and activists to use the skills they have to do as much good as possible. I've seen many organizations eschew "expensive" consultants, instead tasking their non-technical staff with learning enough technical skills to install, self-educate, and configure online tools. Sometimes this burns hundreds of otherwise-useful staff hours when someone with more experience could give them results-oriented solutions in just one day. If those resources are spent on just one organization or campaign, the same process is repeated over and over, without any support structure or overall growth.
We try to help through community involvement, local user group support, and, of course, open source development. But we also know that for mission-critical resources, free or cheap services can do more harm than good. One of the biggest costs of any new technology is training and support, and without a viable way to get help even the best tools in the world can go to waste. If your vendor can't afford to take your calls, or even keep the lights on, you're worse off than you were before you started.
I'm also really excited about meeting new people and watching their initiatives grow. One of the most rewarding aspects of our Lab Hours has been watching the cross-pollination of Drupalific ideas. People learn from each other as the work on common or disparate goals, and Advantage Labs gets real-world ideas that make our module development and hosting tools even better. All at a cheap but sustainable price point.
To me, this class is a cumulation of everything we've been working for. At $1500, the non-profit class covers basic implementation, training AND hosting - for a fraction of the cost of hiring a seasoned developer. But you still get Barry's great real-world NPO experience and Bobbi's presentation style, and tips and time-saving strategies, and code from our time with Drupal. It's all pretty experimental but I'm hoping that, like other things we've done, it will be greater than the sum of its parts. I can't wait!
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