"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Friday, June 6, 2008

NTEN Report

As Jon Stahl pointed out over at Nabble, the Nonprofit Technology Network published its 2008 CMS Satisfaction Survey (see the link at the bottom of his post--thanks, Jon). Today I'm going to look at their CMS Adoption data (pg. 9).

Please don't take this too seriously, since the sample size isn't terrifically large (but congrats to NTEN for getting so much data). As Jon pointed out, this is a self-reporting survey, so it is anything but random.

Here are the columns for all organizations irrespective of size (measured by budget):


Count Percent
Other 216 29%
Drupal 114 15%
Plone 62 8%
Joomla! 59 8%
Convio_CMS 52 7%
Antharia 49 7%
Blackbaud 47 6%
iMIS 26 4%
Kintera_Sphere_CMS 26 4%
ImpressCMS 20 3%
WordPress 18 2%
Ektron 14 2%
Custom 14 2%
XOOPS 13 2%
Convio_PageBuilder 12 2%
CrownPeak 11 2%
TOTAL 754

"Other" comes out clearly at the head of the pack with Drupal a distant second and Plone/Joomla! leading the peloton at 8%. Let's now look at the values for small organizations (budgets under $500K):


Count Percent
Other 43 21%
Drupal 40 19%
Joomla! 31 15%
Plone 31 15%
Antharia 16 8%
WordPress 10 5%
XOOPS 10 5%
ImpressCMS 9 4%
Blackbaud 4 2%
Convio_CMS 2 1%
Custom 2 1%
Kintera_Sphere_CMS 2 1%
Convio_PageBuilder 1 1%
CrownPeak 0 0%
Ektron 0 0%
iMIS 0 0%
TOTAL 210

"Other" is still on top with 21% and Drupal is still seated in second, but both Plone and Joomla! at 15% have pulled away from the peloton (<9%).

For large organizations we find:

Count Percent
Other 87 31%
Convio_CMS 35 12%
Blackbaud 26 9%
Drupal 20 7%
iMIS 14 5%
Plone 13 5%
Antharia 13 5%
Kintera_Sphere_CMS 12 4%
Joomla! 11 4%
Convio_PageBuilder 9 3%
CrownPeak 9 3%
Ektron 7 3%
ImpressCMS 6 2%
Custom 4 1%
WordPress 1 0%
XOOPS 1 0%
TOTAL 283

If one looks at medium-sized organizations (no need for another chart, trust me) ,"Other" once again tops the list with everyone else far below in the pack. Drupal is now fourth, Plone sixth, and Joomla! sinking to ninth.

What can we conclude from this? Here's the graph of all the data, including the medium-sized organizations:

Among large, well funded nonprofits, "other" (which may frequently mean home-built), far and away is reported more often that any of the other titles.

At small nonprofits, "other" along with Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! fare roughly equally well.

In between, at medium-sized organizations, "other" and Drupal top the ranks.

Another way to look at this is to combine large and medium org percents (M+L) and compare that score against the small org number.


M+L
Small minus M+L

Count Percent Percent
Joomla! 25 5% 9%
Plone 28 6% 9%
Drupal 65 14% 5%
XOOPS 1 0% 5%
WordPress 6 1% 4%
Antharia 23 5% 3%
ImpressCMS 11 2% 2%
Custom 10 2% -1%
Convio_PageBuilder 9 2% -1%
CrownPeak 10 2% -2%
Ektron 12 3% -3%
Kintera_Sphere_CMS 21 5% -4%
iMIS 24 5% -5%
Blackbaud 34 7% -5%
Convio_CMS 42 9% -8%
Other 142 31% -10%
TOTAL 463


Now Plone and Joomla! move to the top of the list, which is to say their numbers fell off most sharply as one moved from small to medium and large organizations. One might conclude that Plone and Joomla! are best suited for situations where there is little money to spare, whether for installation, licenses, training, customization, or IT in general. Drupal and "other" are then favored when there is a larger org with presumably more disposable income to spare on CMS.

But without a doubt, the biggest lesson from all this is that open source is very strong within the not-for-profit community.

2 comments:

ntenhross said...

Thanks for all that number crunching! It's true - we saw that small nonprofits took particular advantage of open source offerings, both CMS and CRM (from and earlier report). Clearly the upfront cost savings is attractive, though we don't know what folks are spending over the life of the product to customize and maintain it for their needs. One note of caution - our respondents are not the most indicative of the sector as a whole. They tend to be much more tech savvy, and have more budget than the sector as a whole. So use these numbers as a guide, with caution.

Schlepp said...

Thanks, Holly. For those who don't know, Holly is the NTEN Executive Director.

Life-cycle costs for OS CMS are indeed difficult to assess. I can give you one data point: we have rolled out 41 Plone portals to date over the last 4 years with 2.25 FTE average staffing. That translates into roughly $70K per portal.

Meanwhile, with a service like Openia for free Plone hosting, I can in a bit of free time more than adequately run my neighborhood association web portal for $0.00. (http://freeplone2.openia.com/mmna)

At the other extreme, for $2M one can get a full up portal, two training workshops in the Middle East, and active collaboration between Sandia National Laboratories, the University of New Mexico, Cooperative Monitoring Center in Amman, Jordan, and 20-odd NGOs in the region. (http://wacsi.unm.edu)