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State of the Magento Association - September 2019

This post was published previously under the original Magento Association blog. We felt the historical posts are an important part of our story.

“What’s the Magento Association doing, and why haven’t I heard anything from you?” — that’s probably the biggest question I got at Meet Magento New York about the Magento Association, and it’s a fair question. As a Board, we’ve been so focused on the individual things that we need to complete to move the Magento Association forward that we didn’t communicate enough with our members this summer. Today, I commit to the Magento community - at least once a quarter, I will post a State of the Magento Association article on our website, keeping you up to date with what’s happening in our Association.

This summer, the Association has been focused primarily on fundraising. While Adobe/Magento were generous in providing all of the funding necessary to incorporate the Association and are providing ongoing funding, in order to preserve our position as a completely independent not-for-profit, we are seeking additional Title Partners to fund our operations so that no one company provides even 30% of our revenue. This will ensure the Magento Association remains a viable, independent trade association for many, many years. We are very close to announcing our Title Partners, and I know our members will be excited to see the major brands that are supporting the launch of the Magento Association.

To be completely transparent — I personally underestimated how long the fundraising process would take. As a Board, we built out a strategic plan for the first three years of our existence. That plan assumed we would have completed fundraising in this spring and substantial programming launched for our membership already this summer, so we didn’t have a contingency plan for communicating with our membership before those things launched. Those plans are still in progress, they’ve just been delayed a bit. Look for some great announcements from us this fall and into the winter and 2020 as we wrap up our fundraising.

In the coming weeks, we will be finalizing and closing out our Title Partnership program and announcing our Title Partners. Thanks to their support, we will then be re-launching MagentoAssociation.org on an association management system (AMS) - just like you might consider Magento an ecommerce CMS, an AMS is a system designed specifically for trade associations to provide content, event registration and management and other functionality to our membership. This platform will allow you to manage your membership online, and it will make it much easier for us to communicate with you. We are also working to launch our first educational campaign, focused around Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration content.

Almost 600 of you indicated an interest in volunteering to help move the Magento Association forward when you signed up to join us - thank you. One of the things I’m most excited about as we close out our fundraising efforts is working with our association management company, SmithBucklin, to utilize their services to engage with all of our volunteers and launch volunteer-led efforts, committees and working groups. That will mark a tipping point in the growth of the Association and our efforts, one that we haven’t reached yet because until we complete our fundraising, we are relying on the volunteer efforts of our nine member Board of Directors and we simply haven’t had the ability to engage with 600 volunteers by ourselves!

Finally, our Events working group has been working on building out support for existing and new Meet Magento events. After the Meet Magento Association wound up their efforts, Adobe/Magento graciously volunteered to support the existing Meet Magento events until the Magento Association was ready to assume responsibility for the elements the Meet Magento Association previously managed. We’ve been working to establish best practices for Meet Magento events and build out a process to help us support the launch of new Meet Magento events globally - including in the United States. We aren’t quite ready to make any announcements on this, but stay tuned - we’ll have exciting news soon.

I appreciate the patience and support of the entire Magento community. I have not lived up to my standards for communication and transparency this summer, and I look forward to making that right this fall and into the future of the Magento Association. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter - @JoshuaSWarren - or find me and the other Directors of the Association at the upcoming Meet Magento events, Magento Live Europe and other Magento events this fall!