The Content Management System (CMS) that we base all of our website consulting projects on is Drupal. Drupal is an open source CMS platform that has quickly become the solution of choice for many nonprofits and NGOs all over the world.

Our team has deep expertise with the Drupal CMS. We've been involved with the project for several years now, and are frequent presenters and participants at DrupalCon, the biannual international conference for Drupal developers. We also co-organized the first DrupalCamp Chicago in '08 for 200 participants from around the United States, are co-planners for the next Camp this summer, and will be helping with the organization for DrupalCon Chicago 2011, the world's largest gathering of Drupal consultants yet.

This offers several benefits to our clients:

• No licensing fees. The Drupal CMS is free to use and customize, so you'll never be stuck paying a hefty annual fee for proprietary software.
• Someone's already invented the wheel. In many (if not most) cases, you'll need functionality that someone else in the Drupal community has already built, and contributed for free. Since we're just implementing this instead of building it from scratch, this results in significant cost savings for you. Why reinvent the wheel?
• Easy customizations. The Drupal CMS is very easy to extend into the perfect solution for your web project, resulting in lower costs.
• Thousands of developers. Clients your board has heard of. Why would you want a system that someone built in-house? The Drupal community boasts thousands of professional developers, who have built a rock-solid, enterprise-class platform currently in use by NASA, Sony BMG, Chicago Public Radio, the World Bank, and others.
• No vendor lock-in. Unlike a proprietary platform, with Drupal, you own your site. If you decide you're not happy with our work, you're always free to take your site to a new Drupal consultant without asking them to rebuild your web presence from scratch.
• Security. The proprietary software apologists frequently claim that open source software is less secure. If this were true, why would most of the servers in the world run on open source software? Drupal benefits from a dedicated security team, and also from full transparency in the source code. Problems are identified (and addressed) very quickly.

If you've got more questions about Drupal, how it can work for you, or why we've chosen it, feel free to give us a call. You'll also see us evangelizing the platform at nonprofit tech events around the country, so stop by and say hi.