What was it, the question mark?
December 14th, 2007 | Published in Nonprofit Tech, Open Source | 4 Comments
I feel misunderstood. Earlier this week, I wrote a post on about the NTEN CRM satisfaction survey. I’ve now seen two posts (one from David Gielhufe, and one from Lobo of CiviCRM) suggesting that I dismissed the extremely positive results for the open source CRM tools (particularly CiviCRM) because the sample wasn’t large, or representative of the sector.
The whole point of the post was to crow about how positive the open source results were. But if I crowed about those results, without making sure that people understood that the sample was small, and not representative (which is impossible to argue against) I would be irresponsible. No concrete conclusions can be drawn about overall use of or satisfaction with CRM tools from this survey. It wasn’t scientific, and the sample was about .05% of the nonprofits in the United States (the foundation center says that there are about 1.4 million of them.) How could that be representative?
NTEN did a great job of beginning to approach this topic, and it was great data. To my mind, it bodes well for the open source tools. That was my point.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:27 pm (#)
I got the message :) But I also have some experience with marketing… and marketing is all about stating the positive without stating the negatives. The negatives clutter the message.
One of the drivers of adoption of any software is relentless positivity. Driving nonprofit open source adoption might be best served by a mix of actors (NOSI as a relentless proponent, Idealware as a responsible reviewer).
Trying to be both a booster and a responsible reviewer is a very hard path to tread. I respect you for trying to tread on it, but over the last few years my own personal decision has been to move more over into the relentlessly positive proponent category.
December 14th, 2007 at 5:35 pm (#)
Well, I do see what you mean, and its an interesting point, one I will have to ponder some. Its true, NOSI is not Idealware, and we’re not going to ever be like Idealware. We are biased, and openly so. But I’m not sure how much good we do as open source advocates if we make things seem better than they are, and people end up being disappointed, and write off open source.
Perhaps we’re beyond that - but I’m not sure - especially for a large number of nonprofits who haven’t yet delved much into open source waters. And of course, my problem here is that my background is in science, not marketing - so I find it impossible to look at data and not see its weak points.
December 17th, 2007 at 1:16 am (#)
Hi,
I wanted to let you know about the Nonprofit December Giving Carnival. Deadline to submit your post is Dec. 20th.
Here is the link,
http://christopherscottblog.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/december-giving.html
Let me know if you have any questions.
Christopher S.
http://www.ChristopherScottblog.com
December 17th, 2007 at 11:33 am (#)
Hi Michelle and David!
First - thanks to both of ou for blogging about the report. I DO think it’s fair to point out that this was not a HUGE response rate. We certainly hope that now the folks have seen what these reports are about, it will boost participation in future surveys to make the data even more valuable.
While I agree with Michelle - it’s really not possible to draw REAL, statistically valid conclusions from our data - I also agree that it was good news for open source tools.
Here’s hoping that the next time around we get even more response!
Holly