A Holistic Approach

[Upperholme]

(This has also been posted as a comment in the blog at http://civicrm.org/blogs/dave-greenberg/lets-market-civicrm-better#comment-7265 and on the wiki in the Marketing pages (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+Creative+Marketing+Strategy+2013) so apologies for cross-posting but I wasn't sure where best to put it.)

I've looked at John Derry's draft marketing strategy, and have been mulling it over through the last week or so, as despite the fact that this seems to me to be a really useful piece of work (and many thanks to John for putting it together), it felt to me that there was something missing. I now think that there are two additional aspects that need to be brought together with this, and that if it is possible to do so, it will provide a far more useful and holistic approach to this whole initiative.

The first is that John's document is essentially about marketing communications: how to put together a focussed communications campaign that gets positive messages about CiviCRM out into the world. Almost by definition it does not address the product itself, and to my mind if we aspire as a community to improve the marketing of CiviCRM we must as a fundamental part of that aspiration address the product itself.

Looking at the G2 grid for CRM (http://www.g2crowd.com/categories/crm/compare) CiviCRM is doing well, but scores just 86 out of a presumed 100 on the satisfaction rating. This is from reviews presumably written by strong advocates of the product (I was one). Why is it not scoring higher? (On the same grid Salesforce CRM scores 98 on satisfaction).

So my questions are: what is the product development strategy? How are the ideas, opinions and needs of existing users and target users assessed and taken into account when product development plans are being made? Is any analysis of the competition being carried out? Does anyone have a strategic overview of the marketplace in which CiviCRM is seeking to survive and thrive?

This plays into the second 'missing piece' - the issues raised in Jessica Kirsner's blog post (Expanding the CiviCRM End-user Community - http://civicrm.org/blogs/jessicakirsner/expanding-civicrm-end-user-community) and the points I raised in response to Michael McAndrew's post (Sustainable CiviCRM Part 1: A service provider association - http://civicrm.org/blogs/michael-mcandrew/sustainable-civicrm-part-1-service-provider-association) that talk about developing a much more effective relationship between the people at the centre of things (the core team and others) and those of us further out on the periphery.

Indeed the very notion of core and periphery, the idea of concentric circles with ever decreasing levels of importance and influence, needs to be replaced with a network-centric approach (a model that is enabled by this technology) whereby we are all at the centre and the needs of end users are at least as important as the ideas of developers and the dollars of key funders.

By bringing together these strands I think we can make huge progress and harvest some major benefits:

• We create the "sustainable ecosystem" that Michael stated as a key aim in his post.
  
• We learn a huge amount about the market, about the needs of various stakeholders in the CiviCRM community and the wider marketplace.
• We are enabled to feed this learning into the product development process and thereby create a product that better fits the need.
• We have a far more engaged community of stakeholders (of all types) who are willing and able to be powerful advocates for the product, and implement some of the ideas in John Derry's strategy.
• More money comes into the collective pot to fund the ongoing virtuous circle.

I'm excited about this opportunity, and very keen to be involved in developing it further, if others feel that this is something worth pursuing.

All the best
Graham

[Michael]

Excellent description, Upperholme. Especially the need to be more network-centric.