This Social Cause was DrupalCon Portland’s Favorite

DrupalCon, Portland, 2024: the only place in the world where you can learn about Drupal, find out how to manage complex workflows from Senior Drupal Architect Bob McDonald, and help us shepherd money to over 100 charities, all chosen by you.  

We pride ourselves on using our platforms as opportunities to contribute positively to the world. For years, we’ve partnered with mission-driven organizations whose core focus is to help people. (People are at the heart of everything we do, after all.) We try to manifest this commitment in everything we do, so we used our DrupalCon 2024 sponsor booth as a turn-key charity donation station, 100% funded by us, but directed by conference attendees. So who did conference attendees give to?

Drupalista’s beneficiaries

All told, we’re set to initiate 110 charitable donations from our DrupalCon 2024 booth, supporting nonprofits around the world. Check out these pictures of conference attendees with their donation proclamations.

Amy Brate is supporting Mary’s Place, helping women and families move out of homelessness into more stable situations. 

Grand Rapids Community College’s David Fitch is supporting charity: water, bringing clean and safe water to people in developing nations.

Avi Schwab is supporting Voices of Children, providing psychological, psychosocial, and targeted humanitarian support to Ukrainian families and children. 

Britany Acre is supporting Black Girls Code, offering computer programming education for Black girls, girls of color, and gender nonconforming youth of color.

Erin Rasmussen is supporting the Drupal Association, fostering and supporting the Drupal software project, the community and its growth.

Kwasi Afreh is supporting Planned Parenthood, delivering reproductive health care, sex education and information to people of all genders and young people worldwide.

Steve Persch is also supporting Planned Parenthood, joining several other conference attendees who had women’s health and reproductive rights top of mind.

Most popular types of beneficiaries

At our sponsor booth, we were excited to discover DrupalCon 2024 attendees’ wide array of important causes, many of which we have pursued personally and through our work as an agency. The chart below breaks down who Drupalistas named as beneficiaries by general cause type.

Data Table:

Spanning the broader cause categories of health, education, poverty and civil rights, participants were specifically enthusiastic about donating to a certain type of organization: those that support women’s and girl’s empowerment. We were very excited to find that this was so important to our community. Also spanning various cause categories, attendees also gave often to groups relieving the impacts of the disasters in Gaza and Ukraine—truly heartening. We are so grateful to everyone who showed up at our DrupalCon booth and our NonProfit Technology Conference booth in March to help us donate to so many important causes.

Our teaching contribution: Bob McDonald on managing complex workflows in Drupal

In addition to showing up in the DrupalCon exhibition hall, we were also proud to have Senior Drupal Architect Bob McDonald give a talk with his mentee, Xiaojung Deng, called Elevate Your Approval Processes – Mastering Complex Workflows.

Geared toward developers and coders, the presentation explains how to create Drupal workflows that succeed at helping all parties understand the state of each approval, who needs to take action next, and what will happen after they click a button.

If you missed the talk but still want its contents revealed to you, check out the recording with slides here.

Why DrupalCon is always worth it

We were ecstatic to be in Portland for Drupal’s hallmark event and contribute through our speaking engagement, sponsorship, and booth activation. In the end, we are part of the open-source community—a group of people with some core, shared values about technology—and we’re heartened by seeing these old friends, making new ones, and shaping the future of a technology we not only believe in, but upon which we’ve created livelihoods, as well.

Thank you to everyone who helped donate to charities at our booth. Special thanks to DrupalCon 2024 for providing a forum for this to happen. We hope our action inspires folks to keep doing work for causes that matter.

Are you in our DrupalCon 2024 photo gallery?

Check out all the photos from DrupalCon 2024 on Flickr or by using the embedded carousel gallery widget below (hover over the image or tap to activate).