#d8rules reaches 100% on Drupalfund!

Today is a big day for the #d8rules initiative! Our crowd funding campaign was successfully funded and reached 100 % on Drupalfund. We really want to thank all you great 137+ supporters from the community: together you made this happen. Fago & klausi may continue with the progress that has been made already for porting Rules to Drupal 8 now and we are looking forward to gather additional funds in order to make sure that all 3 milestones can be reached in time!

Before Drupal Dev Days Szeged, fago & me decided to collect funds for porting Rules to Drupal 8 because of the following reasons:

• We felt there is a need for Rules in Drupal 8
• Fago doesn't have enough free time because he runs drunomics, works on the Entity initiative for Drupal 8 and maintains several high-profile modules in Drupal 7 already
• We felt that Rules should be ported as soon as possible, so that other contrib modules can have their integrations ported and we can fix some Drupal 8 issues like Conditions API & a Ctools-like Context system that is also required for the layouts initiative
• As much as we love working on client projects, developing modules and giving back to the community on a large scale as with the Rules module is definitely something that we are passionate about 

To be honest, we really underestimated the effort required to run this whole campaign. I stopped counting hours at some point, but I can assure that there were several hundreds of hours invested mostly from our free time to assure that everything is set up properly. So here's a wrap-up of how we did it, and be assured we have learned some lessons on the way :)

Setting up a project plan & defining our mission of course was critical in the beginning. That's probably something that you already do for your regular projects, so nothing really special in here. The only difference is that you don't know where your budget will come from.

• Estimated hours: 1048
• Community rate: € 45 / hour (drunomics and epiqo agreed to let fago & klausi work on Rules for the self-costs)
• Milestone 1: € 13,500­  (~ $ 18,600) 
• Milestone 2: € 15,660­ (~ $ 21,600­) 
• Milestone 3: € 18,000 (~ $ 24,815) 
• Total goal: € 47,160 (~ $ 65,000)

For a regular Drupal project that is probably a medium-sized budget, but for collecting funds that goal felt pretty ambitious. Before the #d8rules initiative, the projects funded via Drupalfund were $ 2400 maximum. 

This is why we decided to go for both corporate and crowd funding:

Sponsor packages for corporates vary between $ 650 - $ 11000 and Drupalfund perks were classified from $ 10 to $ 270.

We didn't want to loose much money on benefits so we tried to keep them focused at marketing (logos in different sizes on the website and other forms of saying thank you).

For the Drupalfund, we were able to add a physical incentive which seems to have motivated quite some people to donate:

Thanks to the great support from 11 Drupal community members at Drupal Dev Days, we were able to get some user voices captured which we then included in our campaign video. Dominik Kiss spontaneously offered to shoot and edit the video and I'm really thankful for the great work he did on a volunteer basis within the short time constraints of one week before launching the campaign on Drupalfund!