Should Idealware accept vendor funding?
We’re thinking through a thorny issue right now. A case management vendor has suggested they may be willing to fund a detailed, unbiased report of case management solutions. It’s to their advantage to allow nonprofits to see the case management tools available, it would give them insight into what nonprofits want and how they and their competitors stack up against it, and they believe their product would compare favorably with other vendors.
Our mission is to provide unbiased, candid reports that are highly useful to nonprofits – and we think we can do that under these circumstances by requiring that the vendor pay entirely in advance, not allowing them any editorial control of any kind, and ensuring the Idealware folks who are actually in charge of reviews and recommendations don’t know who’s funded it.
And it gets a case management report written, which is one of the software areas that we’d most like to cover.
But we’re concerned that others may be concerned, that it makes it look like Idealware is selling out to vendors, or, worse, selling favorable reviews.
We’d love to know what you think. Would a report written under these circumstances be useful to you? Please take our brief survey now – it won’t take more than a minute or two – or leave some comments below.
Our mission is to provide unbiased, candid reports that are highly useful to nonprofits – and we think we can do that under these circumstances by requiring that the vendor pay entirely in advance, not allowing them any editorial control of any kind, and ensuring the Idealware folks who are actually in charge of reviews and recommendations don’t know who’s funded it.
And it gets a case management report written, which is one of the software areas that we’d most like to cover.
But we’re concerned that others may be concerned, that it makes it look like Idealware is selling out to vendors, or, worse, selling favorable reviews.
We’d love to know what you think. Would a report written under these circumstances be useful to you? Please take our brief survey now – it won’t take more than a minute or two – or leave some comments below.
posted by laura at 9:25 PM Permalink
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5 Comments:
I think Idealware has already compromised its alleged impartiality by using Democracy in Action's tools for fundraising -- a vendor that Idealware reviews on its site.
Yeah, this is a hard issue. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to use *some* software, and short of not reviewing whole categories of tools because we need to use them, we couldn't find any way around this.
Our current policy is to accept the fact that we need to use software, but not to publicize what we choose (one of the reasons we chose DIA was because it's comparatively invisible, though someone who knows what they're looking for can see it), not to allow vendors to market that we use it, and to not accept any donations of or discounts on software that wouldn't be available to other comparable nonprofits.
Do you guys have suggestions on better ways to handle this?
"I think Idealware has already compromised its alleged impartiality by using Democracy in Action's tools for fundraising -- a vendor that Idealware reviews on its site."
Are you serious? Do you think the guys at consumer reports don't drive cars and own refrigerators? Siskel and Ebert aren't allowed to pay for HBO? The guys at CNet have to live in caves with no electricity?
I do think vendor funding might influence reports, and I do think that I might trust Idealware less if they took it. But your notion that they're already no good because they already use software, you clearly haven't thought about this very hard. What exactly are they supposed to do, not take donations because they'd like to review donation tools? I suppose you think the fact that they review webhosts means that they should stop being a web service, and start handing out their reports on the streetcorner?
This is precisely the kind of paranoid, self-righteous posturing that's holding our entire sector back. I'm tired of it.
What if the contributor's product is actually the best? How do you say so without looking compromised by the donation? Would you, intentionally or not, alter the review to avoid declaring the contributor's product the best?
"What if the contributor's product is actually the best? How do you say so without looking compromised by the donation?"
This is an excellent question - to my mind, something far more likely to skew the results than trying to please the company that funded the report. This is the reason to have a firewall up so that the people making the recommendations don't know who funded it (as we suggested in the survey). Otherwise, it's virtually impossible to keep that knowledge from influencing the results in unpredictable ways.
The perception that we've been influenced is much harder to avoid, and is a substantial danger. One upside is that there's unlikely to be any one "best" tool in any of the markets we cover - there will be a number of good best depending on your needs.
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