Results from the Vendor Funding Survey

We got a great response to our survey – 155 responses! And well more than half of the people responded wrote in comments. Thanks so much for your help – it means a lot to us that so many of you weighed in to help us make this decision.

And the results (drumroll please):

• In general, you felt that vendor funding would have little affect on whether you would read a case management report - 84% of you agreed that you would read the report if it was foundation funded, compared to 79% if it was vendor funded.
• Similarly, the vendor funding had little effect on whether you felt you would use it to make software decisions – 74% agreed you would use the foundation funded, while 63% agreed they would use a vendor funded report.
• And a whopping 85% agreed that a vendor funded report was better than no report at all
• However, 61% agreed that they would question the impartiality of a vendor funded report
• And 34% felt that if Idealware accepted vendor funded for a report, they would be less likely to trust Idealware resources overall.

Want to see the comments? Download them now. They are complete and unedited, except that I’ve removed people’s names and email addresses where they wrote them in. Note that those who agreed they would trust Idealware less if we accepted vendor funding were notably more likely to comment (72% of these folks commented vs. 52% of those who disagreed with this question), so the comments are skewed toward the "don't do it" direction.

While all of the rest of the results seem to support the idea that this vendor funded report would be better than nothing and people would take it with a grain of salt, I'm very concerned about the 34% who would be less likely to trust Idealware resources overall. More details as we work through our options.

And a plea to the ether: Someone wrote in the comments "We are a nonprofit organization that takes on funding from industry. Like you are considering, our funders have no editorial control over our content and our writers don't know where the money is coming from." I would love to talk to you, but I don’t know who you are. Are you out there? Can you email me (laura@idealware.org)? Anyone know what organization this is?