In a nonprofit world entirely too clubby for its own good, Personal Democracy Forum has sent out a tell-all review of CRM vendors. That’s a big shift. I know I know, we’re all too scared to talk about vendors. Well, now there’s a review. It says who’s naughty and nice. I don’t know to cry or be happy about the vendors with no stars. I compared the no-star vendors with the vendors called out on this blog to see if there was any agreement. There was none. CompleteCampaigns.com scored well on the vendor review but didn’t do well in that blog. As an aside, have you checked out those comments threads lately on Then There Was the Time? While the first 20 comments were a bit vitriolic, the last 10 or so comments have become vendor-friendly in a mocking tone.
Help me people, I’m irony-impaired today. It must be from having to deal with too many of my users not being able to understand that paper trays need to be filled in order to operate their printers… Anyone with comments about the vendors PDF has listed?
And what’s up with that CompleteCampaigns.com site? It looks like someone hit it with the ugly stick. I mean, I get the rounded corners shtick (so Web 2.0) but I guess they didn’t understand that fixed width headers tends to go along with that design…
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One comment on the survey itself… the reposnses all come from registered members of the pdf website. Its impossible to understand this data without some idea of how large the sample was, and how many users ranked each one of the products.
For example, several of the vendors have no stars. Is this because all of their users gave them bad report cards? Or is because the sample did not include any users, in which case they are unrated, rather than poorly rated?
In effect, the survey may be telling users to steer clear of products the PDF website membership is not familiar with, to only work with the already well-known providers.
Michael Stein
[Full disclosure: my company works closely with Orchid Suites, Inc]
You’ve got a good point Michael. I couldn’t understand how people got zero stars so I’m looking for people to comment. I kept thinking could it be really that bad, are people finally getting upset with vendors or did they get no stars simply people couldn’t be bothered to rate them or didn’t know anything about them?
I’m hoping that PDF discusses this issue with the ratings soon.
Well, in response to my email to PDF, a clarification has been added to the survey results. Compaies were only rated if they got more than five responses. So the products with grayed-out stars ARE unrated. I received a very prompt response from Josh Levy at PDF.
Thank you for raising this question; it\\\\\\\’s important. We didn\\\\\\\’t including user ratings for companies that had fewer than 10 responses to our survey, because we felt that was too small a sample to be useful. We should have explained that a \\\\
OK, that was wierd. Let me try that again.
Thank you for raising this question. It’s important. We didn’t include user ratings for companies that had fewer than 10 responses to our survey (not five), because we felt that to be too small a sample to be useful. We should have explained that clearly from the start and we’ve corrected it now. I apologize for any confusion.
The overall survey had 186 responses. We plan to update it around our May conference and will do so periodically. We also invite subscribers to add their own comments to each company’s listing, and hope by creating a forum for this discussion both the companies and their users will benefit.
Micah Sifry
Editor, Personal Democracy Forum
Hi all!
Very Interesting…
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Hello !
Sorry to bother you. I found this forum when looking through google for forums to use. I need
to install a forum on my website but I cannot find where it is sold.
Where did you get this one
Thanks for any assistance
wepouys, this forum is actually part of WordPress. If you want the look of this site, check out iamwww.com. For more about this template, see http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/how-do-you-like-the-new-look