First let me thank almost 500 people who've purchased a Drupal association membership. Your support makes it possible to hold Drupal events like Drupalcon North America, Europe, and soon hopefully a Drupalcon Asia. It's also allowing us to purchase the hardware we need to run Drupal.org and help prepare for a redesign.

There's been a backlog in processing memberships and we are working to fix this problem. Let me give you a bit of a technical explanation and then explain what we are doing to fix this.

When a person purchases a Drupal association membership, they may use up to five different email addresses when communicating with us.

1) When they apply for the membership the will use their personal email. For example: kieran at acquia.com.

2) When they pay for their organization membership they will use their companies paypal account say payment at acquia.com. In some cases, it may be the most convenient PayPal account, usually their spouses. Spouse at gmail.com

At this point if they have successfully paid for their membership then they will have a new contact record in the associations contact relationship manager, CiviCRM. If CiviCRM receives notification from PayPal that the payment was successful, then CiviCRM will automatically process a one year membership starting at the time of payment. If CiviCRM does not receive notification, then your membership is left pending. On March 27, 2008 payment notification stopped working and we are left with a backlog of 58 memberships that we have to manually verify. In total we have a backlog of 295 pending payments, most of which will be people who either chose not to complete payment or who are spammers.

3) Next people will want to update their information in the membership directory. They can do this by creating an account at https://association.drupal.org. This introduces two possibilities, they can create an account with their drupal.org login or they can create a new account. Let's assume they use they kieran@drupal.org as their login. We now have three separate email addresses that need to be resolved: CiviCRM contact, Payment email, and Drupal.org user account.

4) If they create a new account, and most do there's a good chance they will use yet another email. If for example, they purchased an organizational membership they might want the account to use info at acquia.com or support at acquia.com. Once again, we've likely got three emails to resolve: contact record, payment email, and the company email.

5) If you contact the association to help you resolve why your membership isn't showing up chances are, you are going to use yet another email, probably a personal email like say kieran.lal at personal.com. Or you might use highschoolnickname-graduateyear@gmail.com. That also makes it fun to try and map who you are to the existing three email addresses we have for you.

These five are the base cases. There are other edge cases involving multiple memberships, multiple user accounts, and multiple payment methods.

You might ask, why are we having these problems, you've seen membership processing done more effectively elsewhere. There are three underlying problems. First, we want your support and it's easier to let you pay for a membership first, and then work with you to resolve your email roulette problems after you purchased your membership. Right now about 50% of people who who fill out their personal details in the membership application don't complete payment. I don't want to add even more barriers.

Second, we need to build out our infrastructure to support OpenID. This means we need to support Chad and Derek to finish porting the Project module to Drupal 6, by helping Earl finish Views for Drupal 6, which project module now depends on. When Drupal.org upgrades to Drupal 6 we will have OpenID. Then we have to ensure Narayan has the infrastructure he needs to install and run an OpenID server. He's already added an SSL certificate so that administrators can log in securely to: drupal.org, association.drupal.org, drupalcon.org, infrastructure.drupal.org, security.drupal.org, testing.drupal.org.

Third we are using open source software to manage our contacts. We use open source software because we believe in the principles of open source, and that by using software and contributing back feedback we are helping to improve it for other organizations. We also don't have to pay for the software, and we can use the most effective payment engine which allows us to keep more of the money from members. While some membership software services will charge as much as 14% to process a paid membership, we only pay around 3% for fee processing. We are currently using CiviCRM 1.8. CiviCRM 1.9 mostly had mail upgrades which we didn't need. CiviCRM 2.0.2 is out and it will help to do a better job of merging these five potential email addresses, and removing duplicate contact records.

Raising money for a non-profit is hard work. But supporting the Drupal project is a very rewarding experience. If you've got 5 hours to help, I'll gladly take some volunteers and train you on how you can help us catch up on membership backlog. This will help to free me up so I can work on the underlying issues of upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 6, getting CiviCRM 1.8 upgraded to CiviCRM 2.0, and working on user experience improvements for the Drupal.org redesign.

Kieran Lal
Drupal association board member - Fund raising