One Shoe and Exove conducted a Survey¹ on the current state of Drupal business and how Drupal business leaders are faring, especially now in the second year of the pandemic. 2021 is the 6th consecutive year of this survey.

Characteristics of the  Survey Participants

There were 77 participants in the survey. Respondents of the Survey included those holding CEO/CTO/COO roles in their respective companies (61.1%) and  20.8% are founders. The survey was conducted mainly among those providing Drupal services in Europe and North America with a scattering from South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. A big chunk of the survey consisted of digital agencies( 43%, 20% consulting agencies, and 18% software companies respectively. The survey noticed an increase in the growth of small to medium size companies (having employee count ranging from 51 to 100) but saw a dip in larger companies (Employee count 101-500).

Growth in spite of the Pandemic

Very much like last year, Drupal business is flourishing in spite of the Covid -19 pandemic second year consecutive. When asked what they felt was the biggest success in the past year, 36% of the respondents were reported to have said business growth.

Image Source: Drupal.org

One plausible explanation for this boost in business and deal size is the way the pandemic has forced many businesses into the digital space in the last two years to survive.

Sustaining Growth in the Post Pandemic Landscape

With the pandemic-induced travel restrictions easing up, how do we ensure that Drupal continues to sustain the growth it enjoyed the last one plus years?

1. Pricing

Optimum pricing is essential so as to retain business while still ensuring healthy margins for self-sustenance and growth.

2. Salaries

For the business to grow, there should be a proportional increase in the workforce. But the main challenge for Drupal companies is the shortage of Drupal Talent. Unless this bottleneck of workforce shortage is taken care of, the work pressure of existing employees can increase which in turn leads to stagnant growth. To retain the talented workforce, offering competitive salaries, is key.

Sector-wise Drupal Popularity

While the survey quite clearly showed Drupal business thriving in 2021, sector-wise segmentation of the various industry sectors revealed something deeper. Take a look at the bar graph below to understand which are the most lucrative sectors to work in for Drupal companies.

The Non-profit and charity industry sector saw a huge leap in digital development to 68.8 % from 55.4 %in 2020. The education sector came second at 59.7% and healthcare third at 51.9%. This is followed by Government Sector and then Media. One big challenge for the Non-profit sector is the very slim profit margin associated with this industry which affects the Drupal Industry growth. Education and the Government sector are investing heavily into digitalization, but again the pricing is lower compared to the private sector. This is however balanced with long contracts, steady flow of work, and timely payment of invoices.

Media though it came fifth seemed to have spiked in the usage of Drupal services by over 10%. This is good news since contracts with the Media sector eventually lead to some interesting business propositions for the Drupal companies.

Promising Industries

To the question which was the promising industries, the respondents think for the coming year, the answers kind of held the same sequence as the industries that use Drupal the most, just that Non-profit went down the list to fifth place. This could be because of their low-profit expectation of the Non-Profit Sector. The most popular answer was “ Not any one industry in particular” which got elaborated as the industry did not really matter rather the size of the project. Another explanation for that answer was Drupal is ubiquitous and industry-wise segmentation is not really relevant.

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Greatest Challenge for Drupal Service Providers: Shortage of Drupal Talent

A longtime bottleneck that Drupal faces are the lack of Drupal talent. This was the main problem cited by over 27%. Compounded with employee churn, this is a hard nut to crack.

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Learn how one such Drupal service Provider tackled this problem

Employee Churn: A Damocles Sword

An understaffed workforce for a growing company means the workload per individual can be too high. This work overload plus the stress and strain caused by the pandemic has led to a growing mental health concern and burn-outs-raised by 8% of the survey participants. So unless addressed properly this can lead to even higher attrition.

Taking good care of employees is therefore a worthy investment therefore for companies. Keeping staff healthy, happy, feeling safe, and with a balanced workload means stability and will reduce the cascading effects of employee churn.

Challenges regarding Drupal’s Popularity

28% of the Survey Respondents were concerned that Drupal was losing its popularity to the question,” What are you most worried about Drupal business in the coming year?”. 23% had “nothing” to worry about, while 19% were worried about ‘recruitment’.

At a deeper look increasing popularity and competition from Cloud CMS platforms are of major concern. “Competing products and content as a service CMS platforms are slowly gaining ground and eating into areas where Drupal was traditionally dominant such as sites/platforms that needed more than basic customization.” and “Clients currently on Drupal 7 choosing a different platform rather than migrating to Drupal 9” gives a clear perception of Drupal among people and the problem lying ahead unless duly addressed.

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Overcoming these Challenges

Drupal’s features make it a strong option for many use cases. There is no denying the fact that its high flexibility and configuration capabilities give Drupal an edge in many situations. So Drupal business owners have to ensure that they play to Drupal’s strength and market Drupal in a way that attracts the best kind of projects.

SaaS CMS platforms are getting better and are attractive to a lot of people, and keeping a close watch on it will be to Drupal’s advantage. Drupal needs to be offered for sites that need its many varied advantages. It is also important with the value provided and not compromise on the pricing since that can only make it unviable. It is also important to know whether people are enticed by the open-source ecosystem or their priorities are different.

The Drupal Choice

The main reason for choosing Drupal according to the survey is because it is open source (63.6%). People no longer are choosing Drupal because they already had a Drupal site. Another reason cited is that Drupal is the right fit for their business requirement. Low costs are no longer reasons for cited for the Drupal choice so adds to the reason to upsell Drupal services to the right audience.

At the same time, some detractors against the Drupal choice are the higher pricing and effort, inferior UX compared to WordPress and SaaS CMS, and high maintenance cost. Knowing this it is key to the way Drupal is marketed to potential clients successfully.

Contribution

Drupal’s strength has always and will always be its active and strong development community that contributes extensively to its work. Drupal service providers are also the backbone of the Drupal community as they introduce Drupal to the workforce and sponsor a major chunk of the contributions.

In the survey conducted, major contributions were through documentation, development, donations, sponsoring events, organizing events, user support, marketing, translations, design& Usability, testing, and themes.

Almost all companies (80-85%) contribute to the much-needed documentation, code changes, and around half of them help to fund the community with donations and sponsoring events. The share of companies contributing has stayed roughly the same as compared to last year. There has been a major drop in organizing events due to the pandemic.  

Conclusion

Drupal Business is at a high. Service providers just have to ensure that you market your services and Drupal to the right organizations.

• ·This will help increase your pricing
• ·Keep a close eye on the workload
• ·Attract more talent with interesting salaries

Sources:

1. https://oneshoe.com/blog/drupal-business-survey-2021
2. Drupal.org