Tell me if this sounds like a familiar story.
You decide to migrate your community. You speak to stakeholders, create a list of requirements, and compile them into a weighted RFP. This may run from 20 to over 200 rows.
You send the RFPs to platform vendors and get responses within a week.
As you review the list, you soon discover that nearly every community platform vendor claims to do everything you want. What luck!
So you select a platform based on price or other nebulous attributes and get started.
And that’s when problems begin. Suddenly, the features don’t quite work as planned. Some aren’t quite as ‘out of the box’ as you were led to believe. Others just look a little ugly and outdated. Sometimes the functionality is atrocious. The problems begin to accumulate as does the cost.
The brutal reality begins to dawn on you…you’ve picked the wrong platform, and now you’re stuck on it for the duration of a 3-year contract.
The lesson is that there’s a gaping void between a platform vendor saying, “Yes, we definitely have that feature,” and that feature being any good.
And the problem right now is that it’s very difficult to tell the two apart because people aren’t even sure what to ask for.
How Do You Compare Platforms That Offer Similar Feature Sets?
This confusion has existed for decades. The difference today is that the new breed of platforms is nipping away at the old guard, promising an equivalent feature set at a fraction of the price.
Which leads many organizations to ask: can a platform a few years old really have the feature set of one that’s decades old?
The RFPs we’re using do a terrible job of distinguishing between features and functionality. They ask about features instead of going granular with functionality.
This lets any platform, regardless of how new or lightweight it may be, claim near-feature parity with the old guard.
This creates a lot of confusion, not only about what separates the legacy platform vendors from one another, but also about what separates them from the newcomers.
And this problem is particularly acute when the project is being run by a non-community stakeholder (i.e., IT, marketing, or customer support). Their platform requirements are often aligned with their goals rather than with the best community experience.
To Help You Navigate This, We’re Publishing Our Platform Feature Selection Tool
To help you select the features that you need and have the tricky internal discussions that you need to have, we’re introducing our new platform feature selection tool.
It’s a tool that will help you clarify the difference between vendors who seemingly offer feature parity. And explain why sometimes it might be worth paying more for one platform than another, even though the feature set is the same, the functionality is completely different.
You can either use this to guide your thinking on the functionality you want or use it to select the right functionality for your use case.
Tell me if this sounds like a familiar story.
You decide to migrate your community. You speak to stakeholders, create a list of requirements, and compile them into a weighted RFP. This may run from 20 to over 200 rows.
You send the RFPs to platform vendors and get responses within a week.
As you review the list, you soon discover that nearly every community platform vendor claims to do everything you want. What luck!
So you select a platform based on price or other nebulous attributes and get started.
And that’s when problems begin. Suddenly, the features don’t quite work as planned. Some aren’t quite as ‘out of the box’ as you were led to believe. Others just look a little ugly and outdated. Sometimes the functionality is atrocious. The problems begin to accumulate as does the cost.
The brutal reality begins to dawn on you…you’ve picked the wrong platform, and now you’re stuck on it for the duration of a 3-year contract.
The lesson is that there’s a gaping void between a platform vendor saying, “Yes, we definitely have that feature,” and that feature being any good.
And the problem right now is that it’s very difficult to tell the two apart because people aren’t even sure what to ask for.