CiviCRM gets a solid A in the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report

Earlier today NTEN released the 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey Report (you need to be an NTEN member or pay $50 to access this report). Long time users might remember that CiviCRM came out on top in the 2007 NTEN CRM Satisfaction Survey. Some of the tweets about this survey include:

• @pearlbear: GPA on Donation Managment from #nten report: CiviCRM:3.85, Salesforce:3.67, Raiser's Edge:3.62, DIA:3.25, Convio:3.22.
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM gets straight As in 5/8 parts of an NPO's data ecosystem (NTEN Data Ecosystems
• @geilhufe: CiviCRM far ahead of competition yet again in independent Report
• @civicactions: Nice marks for @civicrm in the #NTEN 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey

  The original survey can be seen here. Note that CiviMail was not included as part of the Email Software Category. Some of the highlights from the report include:

• CiviCRM had the highest adoption rate of all software packages in the survey for organizations with up to $500,000 budgets across all application categories (Donors, Events, Volunteers, Activists, and Clients). It was the ONLY software package which had the top adoption rate in all categories for a given budget size.
• CiviCRM had 75 responses. 50% of the respondents were orgs with budgets up to $500K, 25% have budgets between $500K - $3m.
• 75% of the organizations use CiviCRM for Donor Management, Volunteer Management and Event Management. Half the organizations also use CiviCRM for Activist Management and Client Management.
• Drupal got the most responses for a CMS, followed by WordPress and Joomla. All three were ranked at the same level or better than the commercial CMS's
• CiviCRM's overall letter grades in the above categories were either an A- or A.

Overall this is a great report for CiviCRM. This means we are on the right track but also have a pretty big market of organizations with budgets > $2m that we can and should attract, as well as the large number of organizations using custom-built solutions. CiviEvent has got great traction and we should make it more solid and use it as an entry point into the CiviCRM ecosystem. Finally we should retain our focus on solid forum and IRC support to make it easier for folks to be up and running.

Comments

Hi,

I'm really excited to see CiviCRM gaining traction compared to similar reports from 2008. CiviCRM 3 is a huge step forward.

However, my read of the report is that CiviMail is the weak point in the suite, with third-party solutions like Constant Contact offering the usability needed for non-technical staff to be able to create and manage campaigns. Do you think that's why CiviMail was not listed in the category?

HiDef is looking at perhaps enhancing the value proposition of CiviMail through some UX upgrades. Specifically I'm thinking the ability for CiviMail to have a drag-and-drop templating solution similar to what CC and others offer would be the first big step. Has there been any talk of this within the community that you could point me to as a dive-in point?

Thanks,
T.J.

so we were not involved with the folks who designed the survey and chose various components, hence have no idea why civimail was not included. If i had to speculate, i'd say the likely reasons are:

1. requires a fair amount of sys admin expertise and machine resources to install and deploy civimail (this has become significanly easier in 2.2+)

2. requires u to manage and monitor your own blacklists/whitelists etc. This is a bit daunting for folks (maybe they were not aware of CiviSMTP and other services)

3. No mailing templates (like u've mentioned)

Adding #3 would be awesome, and we'd love for HiDef to take the lead on this. Ping us on IRC and we can chat and get u'll started

lobo