At CiviCon San Francisco, and at the sprints that followed, we spent a fair amount of time on the subject of ‘CiviCRM as a self-sufficient and financially sustainable ecosystem’. These discussions were wide ranging and super interesting (thanks to Peter Petrik from Skvare for his input and help facilitating). Following from these discussions, we have set ourselves two high level goals for the next 3 years:
- Make CiviCRM a financially sustainable ecosystem, funded primarily through its community of users and service providers
- Ensure that the community is aware of how much it costs to ‘run’ CiviCRM, and how any money that they contribute gets spent
These two goals are pretty closely related since if we are trying to do 1, then it is reasonable to expect 2.
In this blog post, I’d like to set the scene a little, and introduce one concrete way that we can get started out along this road: a service provider association. There is lots more to say about the above two goals (please join in the conversation and watch out for more blog posts in the coming weeks and months) but for now, I’d like to concentrate on the service provider association.
Think of this blog post as a first draft for discussion and refinement before we start building stuff out. None of the ideas here are set in stone but we do want to take the first steps soon, so now is the time for input. We want to hear your thoughts and ideas on the best ways forward. Let me know if we have missed anything important, and feel free to contribute extra details, and suggest ways in which we can improve things. We’d also like to have your help in building this out. If you have resources you can put towards this, let me know.
We'll refine our plans over the next few weeks and then then start building.
How did we get here?
All of us in the CiviCRM community strongly believe in free, libre and open source software. However software is not 'free to produce'. CiviCRM software has been made possible primarily through generous contributions of foundations and forward-thinking non-profit organizations. Over the past few years there has been a substantial growth in the contributions of code, time, and money from people like you, i.e. our amazing community of users, implementers, and developers.
It's hard to believe but CiviCRM has been around for over 8 years now. Looking around, you'll see a solid user base and a healthy service provider community. So now seems like a good time to think about how we can sustain the momentum for the next 8, 16, and 32 years!
Why a service provider association?
A service provider association is a good focal point for an ‘iteration’ of sustainability. It is well defined and small enough for us to have some initial discussions, build out some infrastructure, and walk some way down the road to sustainability.
What is the time frame?
Our target is to build the service provider association over the next 5 months. We’d like to have it ready in time for CiviCon London and the sprints that follow. At that point we can review work so far and work out next steps.
What is the broad aim of the service provider association?
In broad terms, the aim is to provide a clear and transparent way for service providers to contribute financially to the sustainability of the project in a way that provides direct benefits for their organisations.
Who is it aimed at?
The service provider association is specifically aimed at service providers - not at end users (unless they are also providing CiviCRM services to other end users). There are a few of other ways we’d like to encourage end users to engage and contribute (see below) but to keep things focused and manageable, we want to focus on service providers in this iteration.
Why should we join?
Our initial list of benefits (let us know if you have other ideas) includes:
- a prominent listing as a service provider on civicrm.org
- a ‘CiviCRM service provider’ badge for your website
- your logo (rotating though all service providers) on the civicrm.org home page
- a service provider thank you slide at all conferences
- 25% discount on CiviCon sponsorship
- a mention in the monthly CiviCRM newsletter when you join
Of course, the more fundamental benefit is that you’ll be contributing to a stable, sustainable CiviCRM that continues to improve and innovate, that you can use to satisfy client needs and build your client base, but you knew that :)
How much will it cost to become a member?
This model is draft: Membership fees will be based on a sliding scale of $1,000 per full time equivalent staff member per year. So for example, a five person organization working with CiviCRM should expect to pay $5,000.
We can potentially look at modifying this scale for larger organisations at which only a small percentage of staff work on CiviCRM, so that, for example a 70 person shop with 12 people working full time on CiviCRM would only contribute $12,000.
At the moment, since the majority of our organisations are based in Europe and North America, a flat rate per full time equivalent seems appropriate. We may want to revisit these rates if and when we have significant numbers of service providers based in parts of the world with significantly lower billing rates.
What are the revenue goals?
Our goal is that the majority of active contributors and a significant percentage of the ‘additional service providers’ sign up. If we can generate between $50k and $100k in funding our first year, we'll be happy :)
How will the money be spent?
Initially, we’d like to assign the money from the service provider association to support the work of the core team. Some of the core teams key areas of work include:
- Co-ordinating contributions (technical and non technical) from the community
- Development and testing 'core CiviCRM' features
- Managing the release cycle and ‘make it happen’ (currently two releases per year)
- Critical CiviCRM bug fixes
- Running CiviCRM's infrastructure (including our websites, documentation, server hardware, and so on)
- Technical support via the forums, IRC and so on
- Community support for meet ups, training, sprints, camps and conferences
While it is true that the core team gets a considerable amount of help from the community in doing many the above tasks, it is fair to say that the core team is critical to getting the above 'out the door'. Hence we think it fair that they should receive the funding in the first instance. We expect to take some significant steps in better defining what is and isn’t ‘core’ over the next six to twelve months. And over time, we are open to collaborating with other organisations to get the above done.
For the record, this year, CiviCRM’s current annual budget is $550,000. The majority of our budget is spent on salaries (currently 9.5 fte), and the remainder is spent on server infrastructure, hardware and other miscellaneous items. If you are interested in more details about how the core team spends their time, you can look at the tools we use to co-ordinate our work, e.g. wiki.civicrm.org, issues.civicrm.org and forum.civicrm.org.
Do we need a core team?
There is a tendency to think that open source projects work ‘automagically’ - that the best ideas bubble up to the top, are developed, packaged and released into the wild through only the power of enlightened debate and voluntary collaboration. Unfortunately, it is not quite that simple. Have a look around at other long lived successful open source projects. You’ll see that they all have some funding model which drives them forward: Linux has the Linux foundation (a trade association); Wordpress.org has Wordpress.com (a paid for hosted service) and Ubuntu is supported by Canonical (a privately held company).
All open source projects have some source of funding that keep things turning and CiviCRM is no different. While we are very open to working out different ways to fund and deliver our work, we think there will always be the need for a core team constituted in some way to guide the project.
What about recognising other contributions?
CiviCRM would not be here today without all of the amazing contributions from our ecosystem of service providers and end users. It is these contributions that allow us to really meet our users needs and to scale the project.
In building out our service provider association, we won’t forget or sideline these contributions, but they won't be our focus for this iteration. Following discussions at the sprints after CiviCon, our current thinking is that:
- we should be more transparent about why people are listed as ‘active contributors’
- our active contributors list should be as prominent as the service provider association
- we should phase out listings on civicrm.org for organisations that are neither members of the service providers association or active contributors.
We contribute in other ways - should we still join the service provider association?
Yes :) Granted, service providers with sustainable business models that contribute back to CiviCRM are vital to our community, and the more service providers that contribute back, the more we can scale. But at the same time, if we accept that we will always need a core team, we will always need some income to fund this team, and joining the service provider association is a simple way you can contribute to this.
With that said, we recognise that CiviCRM is not a one size fits all community, that not everyone will want to join the service provider association, and that organisations can play a vital role in our community without being members.
How will the service provider association be governed?
We are keen to establish a workable mechanism for governing and representing the service provider association, and we want to avoid bureaucracy wherever possible. Our current thinking is that a board made up of 3-5 representatives of the association would be able to provide representation and any necessary co-ordination with the core team.
What other revenue streams are we exploring?
Other revenue streams that we have benefited from in the past and are still actively exploring include:
- Make it Happen i.e. crowd sourced contributions from both service providers and end users. Note that approximately half of the 4.4 make it happens are being carried out by the core team, and the other half are being carried out by trusted developers (Make it Happen campaigns currently represent 5% of the project's total income)
- Major Sponsors i.e. multi-year projects from end users and service providers that are strategically aligned with the project's goals
- Foundation support
- 'Support CiviCRM’ contributions from end users and other contacts (see this blog post).
Don’t forget that there is nothing stopping you from helping us out with these revenue streams. We are especially interested to hear from any organisations that may want to become major sponsors or work with us to secure foundation support.
What are the next steps?
We’d like to work to the following time frame:
- Now till 7 June - preliminary discussions and recruit an implementation team
- 10 - 14 June - create first draft / alpha
- 15 - 28 June - blog post and feedback on first draft / alpha
- 29 June - 5 July - create second draft / beta
- 6 July - 21 July - blog post and feedback on first second draft / beta
- 22 July - 21 September: release candidate up and running
- 22 September: Service provider launched (members signed up)
Looking forward to your thoughts and participation!