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User Surveys Core (Mozilla Open Source Seed Fund)

How much? $5,000

When was it won? October 27 2018

How was it won? A pitch at Mozfest 2018 London. A group of UK community did a session at the event, built around Michael McAndrew's chatbot to create a choose-your-own-adventure game. After being invited to pitch for some money, a fundraising channel was created and after some community feedback, Rose & Nicol pitched to five Mozilla staff from Mozilla Open Source Seed Fund and were successful.

To do what? Support core team financially (80%), and do some market research to answer two questions around language-use and CRM-choice for non profits (20%).

How much time has been spent? Depends if you include the work that went into the initial event, which was a lot for relatively few attendees, for e.g. - but it was separate and designed solely to spread the word of Civi. It failed at that, but meant we were in the right place to live-pitch - and on the Mozillan's radar. So just the main project..

  • Nicol - about 80 hours, about ~64 in-kind.
  • Rose - X hours
  • Core team - 3 hours
  • Others - about 8 hours

What did we end up with?

  1. CiviCRM Core Team funding ($4k). For Core generously said after we won the funding it was up to us how to spend 100% but we felt they could prioritise spending better than us.
  2. 169 responses to a lengthy (10-15 mins) user survey with a number of findings including factors behind CRM choice, common features and asatisfaction, introduction/migration experiences, costs & income, sources of support and advice, and attitudes to Open Source software.
  3. Raw survey data (anonymised and stripped of identifying info): Open Office, Numbers, Excel.
  4. Survey findings & analysis, detailed here
  5. Better understanding of internationalisation issues, and a small pool of people who've offered to help with translations. Findings are detailed in depth here, summarised here, survey was here.
  6. Initiation/exploration of a process for LLC-supported, community initated fundraising. This differs to strictly Core-driven, or Community-driven fundraising. This page is a part of that.
  7. Hard to know yet what impact the survey findings will have on the many other discussions in the community.

Was it worth it?

  • Core says: in general, yes it was clearly worth it. For one, it demonstrates how the community can identify opportunities and implement them (do-acracy). Second, it provides both data on and engagement with our community. Finally, the connection with Mozilla is invaluable. This effort was identified and implemented by motivated community members. That's a huge win. Thanks to Nic and Rose!
  • Community says:
  • People who did the work say:
    • Nicol: Too soon to tell. Wins are money for core, connection with Mozilla, and a rudimentary process for community-led, core-channelled fundraising. Too soon to say what impact the actual research has had. I personally know I don't want to do another survey again (tho happy to share lessons from this process if someone runs one in 2020).

Lessons

  • A user recommendation to use LimeSurvey, 'the open source survey tool' in future surveys.
  • Process has an endpoint (i.e. this doc) so probably needs a clear starting point (goals) to compare against.
  • As it ran over schedule - could have had a tighter project scope at the start.
  • Active PR/advertising/targetted campaign would have been needed to get more results outside of the CiviCRM community.
  • The banner inside CiviCRM is incredibly effective at generating clicks (over two-thirds of responses came in the 24 hours that banner was up).
  • Experts - be it market research or graphing/charting would have made this process easier (tho more expensive).

What next? (e.g. sharing findings, communicate with funders

  • Phil, a CiviCRM community member with a stats background is looking at the raw data to see if they can provide more in-depth analysis of the raw data and findings.
  • Michael McAndrew is running user interviews with specific users who identified open-ness for further questions in the original survey.
  • Discussions about further applications to MOSS strand 2 (Mission Partners, which this was under) & strand 3, (Security) is underway on Lab and in Mattermost.