NTEN Donor Management Survey and CiviCRM ...

David Geilhufe (full disclosure: he is on the board of Social Source Foundation, the non-profit behind CiviCRM) has written a good article on What is Donor Management Software. The article discusses some of the potential reasons on the exclusion of CiviCRM from the list of software products. If you do use CiviCRM for donor management, do take the survey and write CiviCRM in the other box. The non-profit tech community is fairly small and most of us know each other. We did exchange email with Holly Ross (NTEN ED) and she explained that the survey was designed specifically for "software designed to fill the donor management function". She also did acknowledge that there are quite a few "grey areas" in picking what products to list. I'll refrain from nitpicking on some of the choices they've made, but in our opinion, CiviCRM does meet all the criteria that NTEN has listed. In addition it has a few more features not included in that list (including the brand new pledge functionality in v2.1) We were a bit saddened initially when we realized that we were not on the NTEN list. When NTEN did publish the "feature set" needed to be considered a "donor management product" the sadness turned into disappointment. For an open source product like CiviCRM, a good rating in a survey like this is our biggest marketing and sales push. We've had quite a few users who checked out CiviCRM because we came out on top in the CRM survey. That survey gives us instant credibility (our case studies probably is a distant second). Organizations like NTEN and surveys like this help us get the word out to the community at large NTEN is a great organization with great staff. They probably need to make lots of decisions (and hence compromises). Such things happen and life goes on. However, you can help, by taking the survey and adding CiviCRM in the other box. Together, we can aim for a good ranking in the donor management survey.