CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Everyone,

My name is Kristina and I am masters student in social anthropology studying client-web designer relationships in the nonprofit sector. CiviCRM is of course made for nonprofits and I am wondering if anyone could educate me on how CiviCRM went about defining nonprofits as a user and what their most prominent needs would be. (Ex. If applicable, what sort of research was done to determine software functionality best suited for nonprofits? Was usability testing part of the process? Were personas created? Does CiviCRM have a concise definition of a nonprofit user?)

I have perused the forum for answers and will continue to do so, but any push in the right direction or additional information would be very much appreciated.

My thesis work can be seen at : www.appliedanthrodesign.com

Please let me know if you have any further questions or comments.

Thank you!
Kristina

The wiki has most of this information.

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Archives
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/spaces/viewmailarchive.action?key=CRM&startIndex=1515

CiviCRM didn't come out of a specific formal design process, though you can see a lot of "lite" design documents on the wiki. It evolved from practitioner experience, primarily from Groundspring (now Network for Good) and Ebase.

Over the years, the design process has changed, but in the early days:
(1) The nonprofit user was defined primarily as  analogous to the Ebase & Groundspring user communities. Generally 50-200K budgets. 0-5 staff.
(2) Needs were defined by looking at the primary interactions nonprofits had with their constituents. However, rather than 1.0 being a customer centric release (i.e. something that is easy and elegant for a nonprofit to use), it focused on delivering a data-model and a software foundation that could support the primary interactions that nonprofits had with constituents... fundraising, events, etc.
(3) We didn't determine what functionality was best suited for nonprofits, but determined what nonprofits did, and then built software to automate and improve that process.
(4) Usability testing was always part of the process but relied on user self-reporting and participating in suggesting improvements.
(5) I don't recall ever creating formal personas, we generally would just discuss things in terms of whatever alpha users we had at the time.
(6) Because CiviCRM is designed as a platform for constituent relationship management, we specifically didn't have a concise definition of a nonprofit user.