The Myth of Bleeding Edge
Tate Hausman, dotOrganize
Many of us mythologize the bleeding edge. We fill our minds with "first mover" success stories like the MoveOns and Dean campaigns of the world that make headlines for using brand new tools. We secretly dream that we too might get our hands on a bleeding edge tool that skyrockets us and our organization to success. And we feel a little ashamed and nervous when peers talk about Second Life, Frappr, and Meebo because we're still struggling with our email.
Dreams of breakthrough success drive innovation and experimentation. But when we prioritize the bleeding edge over basic needs, we do a huge disservice to our organization and our cause.
The vast majority of social change organizations don't want to and aren't in a position to use bleeding edge tools. It's not for lack of information, or cost, or technophobia. To put it bluntly, it's because most organizations don't have their basic tools and databases in order. And they're the first to admit it.
A few months ago dotOrganize set out to learn what social change organizations actually need from their tools. The 400 individuals we polled stuck to the basics. Between 70% and 95% either used or wanted to use standard tools like email alerts, online donation tools, and content management systems. Emerging technologies like text messaging, social networking tools, and wikis scored in the 30% to 40% interest range. Rates of people actually using those newer tools were in the single digits. And none of the tools we asked about were bleeding edge technologies - they've all been widely available for years and have entered the general lexicon. Truly bleeding edge tools wouldn't have even registered on the scale.
We learned that the more bleeding edge the tool, the less it has perceived value. This inverse relationship isn't at all surprising given what we discoverd from the rest of the survey. Today's technology isn't meeting social change organization’s basic needs. Nearly 60% of respondents said that their satisfaction level with their tools was somewhere between "frustrated" and "it's a disaster." Only one percent of respondents said they were completely satisfied with their tools.
The survey revealed that more money didn't correlate to mastery of technology. Even organizations with large budgets and dedicated technology staff focus on their basic needs, rather than bleeding edge tools. When asked to make open-ended comments about their needs, virtually no one asked for anything bleeding edge. Instead they asked for systems that interoperate and share data freely, better tech support, and better training.
In other words, organizations want to get their house in order before pushing the boundaries. They understand that building new additions on a weak foundation is a recipe for frustration and disaster.
It's easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of bleeding edge tools. But what social change organizations really need is enterprise class software that meets their needs at affordable prices. That doesn't require bleeding edge technology. But delivering that at prices that nonprofits can afford, now that would be bleeding edge.
enterprise class software that meets their needs ... at prices that nonprofits can afford, now that would be bleeding edge.
That is what open source is doing in some cases, and is promising to do in most others.
If you're going to be frustrated or have a disaster, you might as well do it with free software.
NTEN runs on Drupal so I don't need to sing its praises. CiviCRM works with Drupal and is a rapidly evolving enterprise constituent relationship manager. Yes, rapidly evolving means its buggy as hell-- but with the most responsive bug-fixers in the business, and that 1% satisfied figure has really emboldened me to suggest open source's bleeding edge.
The important point I want to make is that if you are an organization with the ability to pay for any software, open source free software is often the best investment you can make individually-- and on a community-wide level it's not even a comparison.
I failed to convince an arts center I helped found -- and where I was a director at the time! -- to put $10 to $20,000 into creating an open source box office and ticketing system instead of buying one. I still think it would have been the best choice, but it was a hard sell to go it alone.
But if twenty organizations were willing to put up a few thousand each (more realistic cost estimate is higher), they could get software that meets their needs, and in a year or so's time (when the commercial vendor would be holding an alleged upgrade hostage), your software would have gotten better for free.
Many commercial vendors are parceling out the coding work that they pretty much stopped doing years ago (anyone use ACT? Ugh!) at outrageous prices.
Let's all try to coordinate on our needs, and look to open source!
(Disclosure: As of eight months ago I'm with an open source web development collective called Agaric Design. My real ulterior motive on the arts center software is what could be called volunteer self-management tools.)
Recently, spending time keeping current with blogs and listservs, along with journal articles and web-sites I developed a pet peeve.
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Persuasive writing is good, but it's often missing. Especially with technology. How does RSS help me? So what if I can share photos on Flickr?
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Websites, listserv postings and blogs enthusiastically announce products and services. What they don't tell me is how I'm better off with the new product or service.
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“Help me out here,” I'm thinking because, like many nonprofit executive directors, I'm doing the budget, marketing and delivering services.
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So I add comments to blogs congratulating people who help me understand how a technology product or service helps me do my job faster or better. I do the same on listservs.
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I wrote this earlier today for an email interview. We've got to do better.
I design websites (among other things) for the nonprofit sector and don't believe bleeding edge technology is pertinent to most of the folks I work with. Many work hard just to create a presence on the internet and the suggestion of the use of more interactive, leading edge tools brings a blank stare. Project managers are up to their ears in their causes (as it should be) and the wild west of the internet is just overload. Nonetheless, I'm in favor of pushing the edge. If nonprofits had a site 1/2 as robust as nten, they'd make more vital connections. In the mean time, I'm all about helping them to be pertinent here and now. Thanks for your insightful comments.
Jeff, I think you articulate my point in a smart way - "Basic CRM is not a dead horse." I couldn't agree more. And more importantly, nonprofit users couldn't agree more!
Like most users, I would like to see more innovation put into improving the CRM experience, and in bridging the CRM tools effectively to communications tools. Know who your people are, then use that knowledge to communicate with them more effectively -- that's the heart of organizing. Let's get that down before getting wrapped up in whiz-bang widgets.
The statement you make here has been percolating in my head for the last three months. I have grown impatient with the nonprofit technology community's - scratch that, the nonprofit technology assistance communitiy's - push for the bleeding edge and even the old-school leading edge to which you refer (blogs, wikis et. al.). I'm impatient because on the ground in nonprofits, the problems are still the same: people come into contact with agencies in a number of different ways, and they have not yet accomplished flagging those different ways let alone spooling out content or inviting interaction based on those affiliations. Basic CRM is not a dead horse. Rather it is the horse that must be healthy if we are to get anywhere with the cart.
Great article, but I believe there's more to this than one definition of "cutting edge"...I constantly see digital divisions even among organizations working with technology. I work with Grassroots.org; we provide free website hosting and volunteer-based design help for nonprofits (in addition to several technology tools we're developing). I frequently interact with organizations that consider it "bleeding edge" to simply have a web presence, in HTML.
Seriously...if we're isolated in our ivory technocratic towers, we never meet these organizations, or we think of them as dinosaurs...the exceptions, rather than the rule.
They are the rule. If you work with national or international networks of nonprofits, it's astonishing (to me) the sheer number of them that are still using AOL accounts and asking for someone who knows frontpage to build them a new website.
Content management is a leap into the future; I demonstrate Drupal and there's immediate excitement, because this idea that they could control their web presence without becoming a techie is so empowering.
From where I stand, the "cutting edge" for nonprofits is a sophisticated web presence, using tools like Drupal. Tools that techies consider more cutting edge are still out of reach for the vast majority. It's a skewed argument; you can't ask an organization if they would use or want to use CRM if they've never used it, simply because they have no idea how powerful the tool could be. Similarly, there's no "unbiased" way to ask an organization if they want a CMS; given demonstrations of a CMS versus a frontpage site over the course of an afternoon, I'm sure most organizations would *love* the power and flexibility that comes with Drupal. But first we have to spend that afternoon with them, bridging that divide.
I'd be interested in a quantitative study on this...something that tells me how many nonprofits "wish they had websites" compared to the number that "wish they had CRM". I think if we could reach the untold numbers of organizations operating out of church basements and the living rooms of the 20-something idealists, we'd have a more telling picture of the state of nonprofit tech.
Long-term, there's a place (and a necessity) for cutting edge tools; at least, this is what I tell myself when I spend so much time learning about them :) However, there is so much distance between there and here that I think we'll redefine "cutting edge" on a daily basis, depending on who we're working with.