Looking for a First Amendment Lawyer…

Anyone know a good lawyer who can advise us on issues of libel and libel lawsuits? We’re in the midst of a process to apply for a pro-bono lawyer, but it’s apparently a long process, and we could use some targeted advice about the release of this online donations report in particular. The report should be ready for release this week, but I’m concerned about the financial exposure we might have if vendors are unhappy with their coverage. I’m obviously keen to make sure we’re not litigated out of existence before we even really get going, if that’s a possibility.

Contact me at laura@idealware.org if you have any leads on a good lawyer. We can pay a couple of hundred dollars, if that’s even a drop in the bucket to any lawyer out there….

Assessing Vendors’ Customer Service - Lessons Learned

I really wanted to include an assessment of customer services in this online donation tool report. It’s been quite troublesome to do – but at least the problems I had were the types of problems you learn a lot from.

I initially tried to gather data via a fairly complicated survey model, called a cluster survey, which worked in two parts. First I asked people who had experience with donation tools to answer just four questions (essentially, so that I could understand what they had experience with). Then I followed up with the people who filled out the first pre-survey to ask them to complete a somewhat longer survey which actually assessed the vendor.

There were several reasons to do this that made sense at the time. This model allows much more control over who could complete the actual survey, hopefully reducing the influence of vendors themselves. And it helps to reduce response bias (for instance, people with strong negative feelings are generally more likely to respond than others, causing a negative shift) by allowing me to follow up with folks to get a high response rate.

But it worked poorly. I got a really poor response to the first survey (I think it may have looked like I was trolling for email addresses), and then, surprisingly, a not-too-great response to the second, which was solely directed at those who volunteered to complete it. There were a lot of tools that I got no feedback on at all.

So in an act of desperation, I sent quick emails to organizations I found on the web who were actually using these tools (it’s fairly easy to find them just by Googling the name of the tool). And this worked really well. I got about a 25% response rate off these emails out of the blue to strangers, and they provided really thoughtful, useful feedback – more useful information than I got from the survey.

So my lessons learned: in retrospect, the survey was quantitative overkill. The small differences that surveys are good at measuring don’t matter for this topic. It’s not slight differences that matter, but big ones – can you generally get a human on the phone, or not? Is it a pain to setup, or pretty easy? Qualitative research works really well here – essentially, just asking people what they think, and then analyzing a number of responses. And, well, an important lesson reaffirmed: people at nonprofits are friendly. You can have faith that they’ll help out if it seems like a good thing to do.

Why It’s Not Good to Go It Alone

Well, one of the reasons for doing this proof-of-concept donations report was to uncover problems in reviewing tools, and I’ve uncovered one: it’s just really hard to care about 26 different tools enough to review them carefully and evenly. Having two people to do the report would make a lot more sense: it’s less for each person to do, there’s someone to confer with, a d there’s another perspective and set of opinions. It’s just really not optimal to have only my opinions inform the whole thing – there’s too much potential that my experiences are coloring the report in some unfortunate way.

I think the coordination that would be needed would actually result in a better report, as the two people would need to talk through and agree on all the main aspects. And frankly, there would be someone else to commiserate with when things get hard (or tedious)… someone who (as opposed to my husband) would be paid for their trouble.

It’s late in the process for this particular report, but I think one of my collaborators is going to help with a thorough review of my summaries and recommendations, which is really great….

BusinessWeek Article on Kintera’s Finances

There’s an interesting article in BusinessWeek about Kintera’s finances and financial strategy:

“Bad things are happening, and that should be good for Kintera (KNTA ), a San Diego company that provides software and processes donations for nonprofits…. Yet the stock is down to less than $3 a share, from a 52-week high of about $10, after company founder Harry Gruber surprised investors with private equity deals and bought up more than a dozen companies during about two years of public trading.”

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2005/tc2005107_4051_tc024.htm

Take the Online Donation tool pre-survey

Just realized that the Idealware survey we're conducting isn't posted anywhere on the Idealware website. Pretty stupid. So here it is:

Are you collecting credit card donations on your website using an inexpensive third party tool – or have you in the past? Would you be willing to share your experience so that others can learn from it? If you are willing to take five minutes or so to review a vendor, please fill out a very brief pre-survey to indicate your willingness to help at

http://tinyurl.com/9tt74

We will randomly select a representative sample of those who have filled out this pre-survey, and send them a follow-up survey on a particular vendor. This two-step process allows us to control the influence of the vendors themselves on this survey, and will result in more useful and representative data. The survey results will be incorporated into an in-depth review of online donation tools that will be available for free towards the end of October.

Gathering Vendors’ Knowledge

Vendors know a whole lot about the areas in which they work. It’s not shocking – after all, who among us spends all day, every day, thinking about and talking to people about online donations like the online donation vendors do? Just their knowledge about the typical concerns of the nonprofits they talk to would be enormously useful. And I’ve certainly learned a ton about online donations, especially on the technical side, while researching this report.

It’s not clear, however, how exactly we can best get at this knowledge so that nonprofits can benefit from it. There are a lot of vendors who are great and honest and genuinely want to help the sector – but the inherent conflict of interest is a problem. If I were to ask a vendor what types of things people are looking for, the vendor is presumably going to tell me that people are looking for what their product offers – it’s just too far from their obvious best interest to say otherwise.

Food for thought.