GROWING AND SUSTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

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Andrew Hunt

Implementor, Developer

AGH Strategies

http://aghstrategies.com

CiviCRM allows our clients to have a robust tool for tracking and engaging their supporters that can grow with them. I began as an end user, and now I work with CiviCRM full-time.
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Paul Keogan

Implementor

BackOfficeThinking

http://www.backofficethinking.com

CiviCRM allows us to bring all benefits and capabilities of a large commercial CRM and
donor management system to medium and large non-profits at a fraction of the cost. CiviCRM also allows smaller non-profits to benefit from an integrated solution for donor management, events, bulk email, etc. substantially increasing their effectiveness as compared to managing a variety of nonintegrated software and spreadsheets. Thanks to a strong CiviCRM community, CiviCRM’s functionality continues to advance and CiviCRM’s market continues to grow rapidly.
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Micah Lee

Developer

Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://www.eff.org

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We switched to CiviCRM so that we could be sure that our membership data stays safe, secure, and private. Now we have control over our CRM and can customize it to work for our needs.
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Alice Aguilar

Implementor

Progressive Technology Project

http://progressivetech.org

The organizations we work with are experiencing the benefits of a robust tool that is
easy to use, supports their work, and allows them to collect and track data from various parts of their organization, such as membership, fundraising, communications, and organizing into a centralized database. CiviCRM as an open-source solution also allows us to nurture and build a user community to share and create a common vision of future features that would be useful to the community organizing field. Just two years after our pilot project, we're currently supporting 30 community organizing groups to use CiviCRM, and the community is steadily growing.
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Kellie Brownell

End-user

EFF

https://www.eff.org

The CiviCRM community has been a tremendous resource for new ideas and helping us solve problems. We are excited to contribute customizations EFF makes back to core and support new features such as batch entry for offline donations or multiple payment processors on one donation form.
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Sarah Gladstone

Implementor, Developer

Pogstone, Inc.

http://pogstone.com

I have been involved in the CiviCRM community for over 4 years, and enjoy implementing and programming CiviCRM for a variety of non-profits. I have been amazed at the rapid pace of innovation delivered with each new release, and CiviCRM's flexibility in being able to accommodate a variety of requirements. I have learned a lot about CiviCRM by participating in CiviCon, online forums, and CiviCRM book sprint.
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Robyn Perry

End-user, Administrator, Trainer

Progressive Technology Project

http://progressivetech.org

CiviCRM is helping us serve member-based community organizing groups across the
U.S. to keep better track of their events, fundraising, and membership data. It's helping our community to aim higher in terms of what kind of questions they should be asking and what kind of data they should be collecting. We chose CiviCRM because it's the best all-around tool to do what our groups need, AND because it's open source.
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Philippe Gervaix

Implementor

ISHR

http://www.ishr.ch

ISHR is currently in the early stages of implementing CiviCRM, and is finding the customisable aspects of the software to be especially beneficial.
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Peter McAndrew

Implementor, Developer

Third Sector Design

http://www.thirdsectordesign.org

Being part of the CiviCRM community is really something to shout about! Not only is CiviCRM an amazing software package, its designed for organisations that make a difference in the world. We help non-profits across the UK gain control of their data through the power of CiviCRM.

It is without a doubt the best piece of software I've ever worked with, and I'm constantly discovering cool new features. More recently I've been working on CiviMobile as part of a project for my course at University. I'm really looking forward to seeing this being used by organisations across the globe.
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Allen Gunn

Ally, FanBoy

Aspiration

http://aspirationtech.org/

By giving the nonprofit sector a values-driven, free/open source solution for CRM needs!
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Michal Mach

Core Team Member, Developer, Implementor

CiviCRM, Caltha

http://civicrm.org

I've always been passionate about what non-profits and advocacy groups can achieve using technology. For me, CiviCRM shows an essential example of how non-profit and technology worlds can come together to provide real change - working as community, creating value for yourself, but also for others in non-profit sector.
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Jake Martin White

Implementor, Developer

PeaceWorks Technology Solutions

http://www.peaceworks.ca

PeaceWorks provides technology solutions for not-for-profit organizations. CiviCRM fills an important niche among our clients who need a flexible, comprehensive, user-friendly, web-integrated CRM solution.

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Home » Blogs » Stoob's blog

CiviCRM Downloads - By The Numbers

Submitted by Stoob on April 8, 2011 - 12:07

These are some graphs I created from the data publically available at CiviCRM's Sourceforge.  Sourceforge provides limited data only on the release dates of a version (i.e. 3.1.5) and then the number of subsequent downloads to date but we can still interpret some useful conclusions from the data.  Dave Greenberg shared one of these graphs at CiviCon.  The data is from Mar 1, 2011 so I wanted to publish them before the data became too stale.

 

The first graphic is the simplest to understand - CiviCRM all versions 2.x compared to all versions 3.x.  Note that the timeframe measured in this graph is similar.  As such, we can conclude that the number of downloads for 3.x have increased about 27% compared to 2.x.

 

The next graph shows the downloads of all versions and their release dates.  The distribution here is roughly equal, but remember there have been four minor versions of CiviCRM 3 (3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3) so the 3.x version has more overall downloads.

 

The final graph I think is the most interesting, which focuses on revisions which are the third number in the series such as: 3.1.5 or 3.2.3.  This graph shows a tendency for the CiviCRM community to download more of the x.x.2 and x.x.3 revisions than the x.x.0 or x.x.1 revisions.  From speaking with other members of the community, my conclusion was that this behavior is due (at least in part) to concerns about stability of the earlier (x.x.0 or x.x.1) revisions.

 

CiviCRM Core Team and community are working hard to create automated unit tests for the software that will increase stability of revisions. 

 

My suggestion and approach (which I encourage others to consider) is to also do increased testing for my live client data by setting up test servers using real sites and testing beta versions to make sure features important to my client work.  I've already done this for a couple clients and will do more this week. 

 

If you haven't setup testing servers for some of your clients, consider doing so now.  You will not only help your client but CiviCRM as a community.

 

Comments

Submitted by mchapman2000 on April 8, 2011 - 13:17

...is that releases are too frequent. I know for some of my clients, by the time they were ready to consider an upgrade to 3.x, 3.1 had been released.

 

Implementors are cautious about upgrades becaus eof having been burned in the past by CiviCRM, and users are cautious because of bad experiences with upgrades of other CRMs. I was told this week that it's common for Raiser Edges users to find that they have to purchase a new add-on to the softwrae after an upgrade in order to restoree functionality they previouslyhad, so happy Raisers Edges users are the ones who never upgrade.

 

People also tend to think of CiviCRM as part of their website, and many organizations think of website upgrades as something that happens every couple years, not several times a year.

 

Slowing down the release cycle should also result in higher quality x.x.0 releases, addressing the other concern.

 

 

Submitted by Stoob on April 8, 2011 - 15:15

I see your point Matt.  Thanks for commenting.  I also have heard similar anecdotes about upgrades.  In addition, many of my smaller clients are also cost-concious.  They know that they can only afford an upgrade occasionally, and cannot afford costly debugging and patches.  Therefore they require that I only install the most stable version (usually the last revision) in a series.

Submitted by petednz on April 9, 2011 - 02:32

hi stoob - to some extent the data is cumulative eg i have a new client, or an old one who finally undertakes an upgrade - and the latest version is 3.1.0 - so they then may also get taken up through 3.1.1, 3.1.2 etc

then another provider gets a new client and the latest version is 3.1.1 - so they also get taken up through 3.1.2 etc

ditto for another client who starts off at 3.1.3 and so on

i am not sure how you can remove this noise from the figures - and certainly don't want to take away your underlying argument but thought i would share this.

Submitted by Stoob on April 9, 2011 - 16:36

If a new adopter of CiviCRM always installs the latest stable version, then they would theoretically then install all the subsequent revisions of that version.  However, in practice this is not always the case, of course.  Many clients skip revisions: like upgrading directly from 3.1.0 to 3.1.5, or from 3.2.3 to 3.3.5.  All we can do with the limited data is measure the raw popularity of the revision numbers, and try to take a guess as to the reasoning why.   Some folks at CiviCon expressed their reasoning why, but I'm sure there are many reasons.

Submitted by Eileen on April 9, 2011 - 05:19

"If you haven't setup testing servers for some of your clients, consider doing so now. You will not only help your client but CiviCRM as a community." I'd be interested to hear more about your experiences with this - although I am fairly familiar now (for better or worse :-)) with the CiviCRM test suite I haven't figured out how to usefully extend this to client sites / client custom code.

 

Also, the frequent release cycle is a blessing & a curse - usually there is something I'm hanging out for every release but we also probably only upgrade major sites every second release due to the disruption it usually causes. We do run the latest dev version for any sites in development, however. And, of course, we run apiv3 off svn on all sites now :-)

Submitted by Stoob on April 9, 2011 - 16:31

How do I do it?  I have a VPN server of my own where I install various versions of CiviCRM and then import client data from their site elsewhere, and copy in the database to my test site.  After the usual resetting of settings and clearing of the templates (you know the drill), then I have real data to look at.  I also import any custom TPL, PHP and Drupal modules necessary.  

 

I test what features that particular client cares about most within the context of the new CiviCRM version, making sure they work.  I will be testing the new PCP functionality within the next few days. 

I understand this is an investent in time and captial not all clients can afford, but it's better than installing a version with no prior testing and being surprised that a favorite feature is not working properly, then getting a patch, etc etc.  You know the drill..

 

 

Submitted by Eileen on April 10, 2011 - 01:35

Ah OK - I was thinking you meant automated testing - yes testing new features etc does take time. I guess when you have more than one client, however, using similar features there is some efficiency (i.e. one client benefits from work done testing for another client etc)

Submitted by dalin on April 9, 2011 - 06:35

Given the many problems with this data, some of which you touch on, some of which are mentioned in the comments, would it not be more beneficial to instead analyze the data of CiviCRM sites pinging home? With this you could also get a lot more interesting information like percentage of sites that upgrade and how frequently, or attrition rate. In fact if you released the data (in obfuscated form), I'm sure that someone would take it and pull interesting trends from it.

Submitted by Stoob on April 9, 2011 - 16:47

That's a great idea.  But I've seen that data only once, and no longer know where it is.  The senior devs do where the data is, and might be able to point you in that direction.  From my recollection the data contains only some of the items you think it might.   Perhaps more significant is that I believe the 'pinging-home' features haven't been in place for very long, and not every site pings home.  I printed these graphs only off what public data I could glean from Sourceforge.  For better or worse, vague or not, we can try to interpret something from it.

Submitted by lobo on April 10, 2011 - 06:49

 

  • Its already in an anonymized manner
  • We definitely should do a better analysis of it
  • We are willing to share it with some folks in the community

 

Please ping us on IRC / email and we can chat about what we are collecting right now and what else we can do. We'd like to get a few more details on the analysis the person will be doing etc

 

lobo

 

Submitted by xavier on April 10, 2011 - 01:18

Hi,

 

Instead of displaying each version as a separate item on the x axis, could you easily put the time (between 2008 and now) and plot the date of the release?

 

eg. so you could see if the 27% between 2. and 3. is due to an increase of download or simply because it has covered a longer period, same goes for the 3.0 version, less download, but only 3 months while the other releases were longer.

I don't know if it's done on purpose with civi, but that's a common one to launch a .1 version quickly after the .0

 

X+

 

P.S. I used to spend a lot of time on data visualisation, using a bar for each version without making explicit the period covered by each is a classical trick to make the data "lie" ;)