Making Money with Drupal Church distributions

So we're The Tribes online there is 3 of us and thought that maybe we should get the issue of talking about money out of the way after reading ray's post. I've written up a fairly extensive blog post about who we are, where we came from, what we're planning and then our plans of how to make money. Personally I definitely think people can make money in a way that still allows for the freedom to steal ideas and therefore allow the whole church to benefit.

I won't post all 2000 words here, just the bit about money but head to my blog if you're interested in us. http://thevr.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/what-were-about-monetisation/

So does this conflict with any one else's ideas? I am aiming to do this because I think the church will most benefit from doing things this way but if anyone has any arguments then please feel free to tell us!

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How and why are we planning on making money?

There are 3 business models that we hope to combine. We hope to give the software away to technical Christians with the time on the hands to get involved in testing and development. Whilst charging more significant amounts of money for consultancy fees we want to provide a Software as a Service model for small churches. Finally there is a possibility of producing books and resources (available for free online such as desiring God but also in shops). They will have less access to customisation but the innovations harvested from contributions and the consultancy will filter back down to them. We’re heavily relying on Acquia’s business model with Drupal Gardens where I think they do a fantastic Job. We think we need to charge some money for a few reasons:

1) This allows us to spend the time developing the free software

2) Churches tend to take free stuff less seriously. One charity I know who really wanted to work for churches for very little suggested a business model where he’d charge a church or charity appropriately large consultancy fees but then make a personal donation back to the church! The reality is that if we are right about social technologies being key we need churches actually using it, not just the tools existing.

3) Marketing and training churches is important, this takes individuals time and so will need money. This gets churches using it and knowing how they use it. I think we want to fit around a similar model to how “Cell churches” spread or even Alpha courses.

Licensing and Sharing Code – Working with the Competitors

Obviously as we’re working with Drupal everything with be under the GPL. This means all the code is shared. Ideally I’d like some components using the AGPL license so even Software as a Service companies such as us would have to share their code. We are thinking of working with CiviCRM to encourage this. This means we’ve thought about two possible ways of providing a SaaS to churches. Acquia provide fantastic hosting either using Amazon’s Cloud network or Drupal Gardens or we could build our whole system using Aegir. The advantage of Aegir is that it means our entire infrastructure will be open sourced, not just Drupal but even how we will manage to thousands of potential sites together. The scary and awesome thing about this is that it means that future competitors could compete with us using literally every aspect of our software! (Whilst Acquia provides the advantage of being much more stable then anything we’d make alone).

In the UK there is one large Church SaaS provider called Church Insight. They are so large they will most likely always remain a competitor. However, the smaller companies (I know of 3) have features that could be easily duplicated on Drupal. This means that whilst we will compete initially, if The Tribes Online takes off we can collaborate with our competitors rather then swallow them up. Whilst it makes the business venture more risky I strongly believe that giving the Church this choice eventually benefits the church more. It means innovations even across companies will be shared and will allow church website companies to remain small and fast moving.

Why have we not approached our competitors?

Up until now we’ve kept a low profile. We’ve been trying to build a church install profile or work with Drupal for Churches but we have certainly said nothing to our future competitors. The main reason is that we are all very young and idealistic. I have been working on this idea for about 6 years and plan to take it as far as it can go. But any good business people reading this will probably know that Entrepreneurs who focus on ideas and not customers get eaten up. So we want to actually build something before we speak to people so not to waste their time whilst working on a more sustainable business model. We do have an Atrium site left up with ideas building up and we’d be happy to work with anyone but think its likely most people will want to leave us alone until we have something of substance.

If people want to steal our ideas or work with them, that is fine however!

The introduction of Open Church.

Our original intention was to duplicate the features of the smaller Church SaaS companies in the UK. Open Church has done this already and so now we want to divert our attention to building that genuinely unique tools. However I think its likely that we’ll just continue flying under the radar. I also think that the UK and the US market are sufficiently different that we wouldn’t really be competing for customers anyway. However if you want access to our Atrium site and there are some ideas you like that you’d want to work on with us that would be awesome!

Do we want a product?

Basically because we care about the church and not the company I don’t care if some other Drupal people make us irrelevant. So far most people (including Open Church) focus on the site building side of things and we really think its the social side of things that is key to building up the church and so we don’t think we’re irrelevant yet. However, we’re all young so there are plenty of other things we can do if someone else comes along and does a better Job then us without needing us!