LakeDrops proud to be Drupal Certified Partner

As of writing this blog post in January 2024, LakeDrops is 13 years old, has 4 team members, maintains 60 Drupal modules on drupal.org and gets constantly credited for contributions. All this is happening purposefully, since LakeDrops allocates 20% of its resources towards Drupal contributions. That's one full day from each team member every single week.

A lot of that goes into code contribution, but that's not all:

• writing documentation
• organising local meetups
• sharing knowledge as speakers at events
• providing support, e.g. on Drupal Slack
• writing blog posts
• recording video tutorials

Those and more activities created a reputation for which the Drupal Certified Partner status in silver has now been assigned, and everybody in and around LakeDrops is celebrating this.

Why do we contribute?

Without Drupal, LakeDrops wouldn't be a thing. None of LakeDrops' projects would have been possible. Likewise, Drupal will be the foundation of every future project as well. For that selfish reason, it is the most logical business decision to do whatever the company can afford, to help the Drupal project to do well. At the same time, Drupal isn't much without its outstanding community, so that being an active part of it is not only rewarding but also fun, most of the time.

However, a project and community of that size can hardly sustain itself without governance. And that's why we're grateful for the Drupal Association (DA) as an organisation and every single person that's being involved in the DA to provide the framework for all of that. For many years, LakeDrops has advocated for the DA and supported them financially.

How can we afford 20% contribution?

We get this question a lot, and our response often seems to be a surprise. This is certainly not applicable to every organisation, but the maths for LakeDrops is simple: the cost for sales and marketing is actually zero, simply because it doesn't exist. Instead, we spend the equivalent "amount" in Drupal contribution. And that turns into a double win, just for ourselves: not only does this help the Drupal project, it also drives our own business; customers find us, we don't have to find our customers.

This might be an oversimplification, yes. Still, it has worked for so many years already, and there's no sign of getting worse. We hope this can work for others too, maybe this post is encouraging, and we'd be delighted to discuss this in more detail if you were interested. The more we all do together, the bigger the benefit for all of us.