Contrib.social

Member Platform Meeting on January 16, 2025

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 12 February 2025, about 2 months ago

Original Google Doc

You might find the original Google Doc from which this was copied to be easier to consume and to include additional detail (e.g. comments) not present in this issue.

Who is here?

  • Barbara Errickson (barbarae)
  • JD Leonard (jdleonard)
  • Bhavin Joshi (beautifulmind)
  • Jürgen Haas (jurgenhaas)
  • Salim Lakhani (Salim)
  • Kathryn Carruthers (kathc)
  • Bob Snodgrass (bsnodgrass)
  • Norah (tekNorah)
  • Tom Yukhayev (charginghawk)

Action Items from Previous Meetings

N/A

What Topics Should We Discuss? / Notes

  • Seek permission from attendees to record the meeting
  • Project background
    • Reason JD initiated this project:
      • His neighborhood association badly needed a new website and its cobbled together membership management system requires too much volunteer time to manage
      • Membership organizations (MOs) share many requirements; why should they each be reinventing the wheel?
      • MOs with low technical or financial resources are stuck
    • This is the first meeting of potential collaborators
  • Introductions. Who are you, why does this project interest you, and how might you want to contribute?
    • Jürgen
      • (LakeDrops)
      • Track lead for privacy for Drupal CMS
      • Interested because 15 years ago started working for a company in Germany offering software with similar target
        • Just a German market product
      • 650,000 potential MOs in Germany alone
      • MOs a big part of German culture
      • Interested in sharing experience
      • Limited availability for contribution
    • Kathryn
      • Doing volunteer work with Senior Women Living Together, a MO in Ontario
      • Careerwise working with nonprofits and labor orgs in Canada using CiviCRM for the same amount of time using Drupal
      • Lots of resistance in Drupal agencies to using CiviCRM (but CiviCRM community likes Drupal)
        • Exploring this as an alternative
      • Interested in Drupal Events Platform as well
    • Bob
      • Working with Drupal for 20 years now
      • Client mix includes service orgs e.g. accountants/attorneys, mfg/distribution
      • Nonprofits they deal with - many involved in foundations or MOs
      • Not lots of great solutions currently available that aren’t paid products / full of old technical debt
      • Adding another thought - most of the organizations I’ve worked with initially fall off the prospect list early in the qualification/discovery process due to the mismatch between the desired scope vs. the available budget.
    • Barbara
      • Involved in CiviCRM and Drupal for 15 years after 30 years in corporate world
      • Retired from Texas Instruments
      • Has worked with nonprofits for all 15 years since retiring
      • CiviCRM can do almost anything a nonprofit needs
        • Over 11k installations
      • Drupal + Civi not for the faint of heart, but once implemented is a very powerful/complete solution
      • Implementing the same feature set of Civi within Drupal would be a very large undertaking
      • On the board of her HoA with 570 homes heading to 1,000, expensive houses = good budget
        • Built resident system using Civi + Drupal
    • Norah
      • 15+ years in Drupal Dev → PM; intern coordinator → Director of Communications
      • Not sure if she has a particular use case except maybe Drupal4Gov
        • Especially donation platforming
      • Bespoke solutions often take lots of effort and are haphazard glued together
      • Has nonprofit clients but not sure how extensive we’re talking
      • Wonders whether more could be handled directly in the Drupal CMS vs an integration with an external system
    • Bhavin
      • More than 17 years Drupal experience
      • Working with many nonprofits inc. with CiviCRM & drupal
      • Many orgs seeking membership features, but always starting from scratch
      • Would love a single solution
      • Available as needed to contribute with coding etc.
    • Tom
      • Interested in a Meetup alternative
      • Web developer in MA
    • Salim
      • Interested in Meetup alternative
      • Recommend: Should get Josh Mitchel involved - personalization
        • For group management
        • Personalization built in
        • Workflow: person assigned to groups, gets news
        • News feed
        • Events
      • Running DevPanel → DrupalForge
        • Dev Environments
        • Integration with Stripe
          • Supports split payments
          • Ideal for Donation use cases
        • Hosting
        • For Dev to take what they are developing, to remarket
        • Not barring open source
    • JD
      • Freelance technical architect
      • Has been working with Drupal since 2006 (over 18 years)
      • President and Former Treasurer of his local neighborhood association
  • Define high-level project goals
    • “Drupal native lightweight ecosystem of user friendly tooling to meet the needs of membership organizations”
      • +1 Barbara - as long as is feature-rich
      • +1 Jurgen
      • +1 JD - turnkey
    • Needs to look nice - Salim
      • Not a fan of CiviCRM look
      • - I have been avoiding end users seeing CiviCRM by using webforms as the data entry and views (using CiviCRM/Drupal integrations) - e.g. profile questionnaire, and exposed filters in a view to find members in a directory. Only the administrators who need to do reporting actually go in to CiviCRM
    • Affordable and feature-rich
    • Membership management as an MVP?
    • Organizations can define the tier and set the price for each tier
    • The solution should offer an environment/framework to define various tier and associated prices.
    • There should be multiple payment processors organisations can choose from and connect with.
    • content management
    • We should start with targeting Drupal 11 along with offering recipes.
    • Ideas
      • Question about whether we start with Drupal CMS
      • Ecosystem for MOs with all the needed features
      • Ecosystem of recipes using the framework
      • Look at Skvare (Mark) which has lots of integrations with CiviCRM →
  • Discuss project management, meeting cadence, communication plan, and other logistics
    • Norah is a PM, willing to help set things up
    • Is this time good?
      • Friday - no good for most
      • Norah: no conflicts today
    • We should have a d.o project/initiative
    • Cadence: bi-weekly (+1 Bhavin) may make sense; ad hoc sessions outside of full group
    • Consider Asynchronous
  • Brainstorm better/permanent names for the project
    • Huddles
  • Brainstorm possible features (whether for initial release or long-term consideration)
    • USWDS Theme (Salim/TBD)
      • Salim doing some work on government sites/theme
    • Focus on ONE segment first (Salim/TBD)
      • MVP, iterate
      • Critical features, foundational
    • Membership dues collection (Salim/TBD)
      • Subscriptions?
      • What do we use?
        • Opinionated or Extendable/Pluggable; both?
        • Can be a lot of effort to support many
        • Global scope may require multiple
      • Commerce module may help to solve this
        • Commerce license supports things
        • Commerce recurring (and licence billing)
    • Membership management
      • Different types of memberships
        • Names (individual/business/family/household)
        • Durations
        • Price per level
      • Self-service join/renew
        • Ability to require invitation to join
    • Content management
      • Pages
      • News
    • Basic CRM
      • Identify potential members
      • Track members’ activities
    • Document/process management
      • Agendas
      • Minutes
    • Outbound communications
      • Email (Mailchimp alternative)
      • SMS
    • Statistics
    • Donations: Payments/in-kind efforts
    • Event Management
      • Video call integrations
      • Recurring
      • RSVPs
    • Groups
    • Messages
      • Social
    • Donations / fees
      • Transaction platforms
        • Stripe
        • Paypal
      • Split payments
    • Articles
    • Initiatives/Projects
    • Barbara - Define the core functions that non-profits may need like: Contact Management, Event management, Reports, Communication (like SMS), permissions/security
    • Sponsorships
    • Multiple membership organizations on one site
      • Would allow to be a “meetup alternative”
      • Could just build with this in mind for future
    • Non-profit vs. clubs and other organizations (possibly for-profit)
  • Base off event platform → ?
  • How to fund the project?
    • Nonprofit
    • DrupalForge revenue
    • For-profit agency / professional services model
    • Bounties for features
    • Membership model
  • Identify next steps and assign action items

Action Items

  • JD to draft a mission statement for review over Slack
  • Schedule next meeting 2 weeks from today - JD
  • Add Project on D.O. (at the appropriate time)
  • Market research - needs a volunteer
  • User testing

Zoom Recording

2025-01-16 MOP Meeting 1 recording.mp4

2025-01-16 MOP Meeting 1 recording chat.txt

Previous Notes

N/A

📌 Task
Status

Active

Version

1.0

Component

Meeting

Created by

🇺🇸United States jdleonard Austin, TX, USA

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