Democrats and progressive orgs like the one I work for have to hire website contractors to build, maintain and host our sites. They fuck us over a lot.
This is where we vent – Internet Directors, Directors of Communications, Bloggers, Webmasters, Communications Staff interns whose job it is to deal with these incompetent/shiftless/bloodsucking/sheisters. Pick a pseudonym and let’s go.
You’re on Notice:
Advocacy Central, Advomatic, Blue State Digital, Campaign Advantage, Campaign Office, Capitol Web Design, Catalist, ChapterThree, Civic Mind Media, CivicActions, Complete Campaigns, CompleteCampaigns, Convio, Development Seed, E-Advocates, EchoDitto, Expression Engine, GetActive, Grassroots Campaigns, Hathaway Group, iStandFor, Kintera, Lullabot, M+R Strategic Services, Mayfield Strategy, Mandate Media, Mediamezcla, NGP, NetCampaign, Netcentric Campaigns, NetPoliticsGroup, NetRoots, PlusThree, Smallbrain Solutions, Thrust360, Trellon, VirtualSprockets, Votenet, Wired for Change…
Add others in the comments, and suggest topics for discussion.
ThenThereWasTheTime 
When I worked at Air America, fucking iStandFor would charge $150 just to create a goddamn static page (when they would get around to actually doing work.) I hate them with a fiery passion.
I was a techie that served for one of the companies above, and I had to bite my tongue when my boss would lead people on and sometimes tell outright lies about what was and wasn’t possible. Because I needed the job and because he was the boss I couldn’t really say anything, but it was bad. Plus, then I was stuck trying to live up to an unrealistic set of expectations. Also, we had more people selling stuff than actually doing real work…
I do not recommend Kintera to any nonprofit.
Not only are they extremely unflexible and poor at rolling out new/social media technology (podcasts, blogs), but basic content containers on my site remain unfixed despite months of work, and faults in their billing system have created budget headaches that have lasted almost a year.
Furthermore, the complete lack of transparency in their billing and work-order processes exacerbates all of the problems I’ve listed above.
If you want to be tearing your hair out and screaming at an automated bill/work request form because your vendor won’t return your phone calls, then Kintera is the right service for you.
Anybody of the above who offer their own private in-house CMS will eventually fuck you in the end.
I’ve watched org after org get screwed by the consultant system and it hurts, but they keep coming back for more. If you want to break the system, dump them.
My advice: Contract/hire and manage your own developers. You’ll pay 1/3 the price and have direct access.
Plus3 literally never finished building the website I asked them to build. They simply ran out the clock. My program ended without the website that needed to be live on the day of launch. I’ll see them in hell.
[…] ’cause somebody’s got a rant (or two, or three) coming on. Democrats and progressive orgs like the one I work for have to hire website contractors to build, ma…This is where we vent – Internet Directors, Directors of Communications, Bloggers, Webmasters, […]
Come on folks, is this even reasonable. Yeah, there are a lot of crappy companies out there doing crappy work. And yeah, it would be good to talk about that stuff, to warn your friends and friendlies off their services. But is this really the way to do it?
The big cheese at Trellon flat-out lied to my face. We cannot be reasonable when our vendors cannot be honest or competent.
I’m agog — what’s the story about this site?
Check out this blog.
Democrats and progressive orgs like the one I work for have to hire website contractors to build, maintain and host our sites. They fuck us over a lot.
Hmm… frank discussion of vendors tending towards a rant. If you know the …
“NetRoots”, as a company was never even formed, never had a client, and never existed expect in speculation on a website.
It’s going to stay as a non-company, and become an OpenID provider and be a conduit for activist tools to win elections for Democrats.
LOL! this site is a total gag… What’s funnier than this site? Mr. Armstrong’s quote… implying that open-source services are “NetRoots!”
oh so funny.
So I go to an auto dealer and I ask for a car that costs 100 dollars, drives 100 miles on a gallon of gas, and requires no service. And I also mention that I need the car yesterday, and if don’t get it now I will go right across the street to the competition, and that the future of democracy depends on my having the car.
How does the dealer respond? He knows what I want does not exist. If he is honest he might just say that. But he also knows that I am better off with him than the dealer across the street because that dealer really is dishonest. So he stretches the truth a little and tries to steer me to a real car actually on the lot in the hopes that I’ll be educated over time, and that even though it may cost more than I hope, the real car will help get me where I need to go.
This is a metaphor for what happens when progressive advocacy orgs (including the Dems) go out and try to buy technology. By and large they don’t know what they are buying, and by and large they aren’t interested in even learning what to buy, not to mention investing in building an organizational capability that will actually be able to benefit from serious technology infrastructure.
The other side, perhaps because they working for wealth and power (instead of justice like the progressives,) does understand the need for both learning and education.
All this is very frustrating to a technology person such as myself who supports progressive causes but who alse needs at the end of the day to make a living.
I am willing to educate progressive orgs for free (I just spent 20 minutes on this post, for example) if that will help them get to a place where they are ready to invest adequately in tools required to fight the good fight. Are they willing to listen?
By and large they don’t know what they are buying, and by and large they aren’t interested in even learning what to buy, not to mention investing in building an organizational capability that will actually be able to benefit from serious technology infrastructure.
This is true, and it’s problematic that most organizations don’t take the initiative to do better. However, in and out of politics, there’s a depressingly large contingent of people who provide technical services in a semi/un-ethical manner. Because clients literally have no idea what they do or how they do it (or if it’s really being done), they’re easily taken advantage of. T
here was this interesting stock market bubble in the 90s that serves as a decent example outside the political realm, and to their credit most corporate/business buyers have gotten a lot more savvy. Maybe it’s because political tech really didn’t experience that kind of boom/bust, but it still seems to have a lot of naive people who keep getting skimmed and project managed to death.
But, such are the perils of a developing marketplace. In the future pricing should become more and more transparent — a big problem right now is nobody really knows what anyone pays for anything. Also, larger-scale clients will learn that, just like with lawyers, they need at least one expert in-house to keep all their vendors honest.
In reality, I think campaigns are best served by building internal engineering capacity and collaborating with the global marketplace through open platforms. That’s a personal bias based on experience, but I think it makes a lot more sense (esp. for large-scale projects) than trusting a blackbox consultancy and ending up locked-in. Plus, with that type of model, you can take advantage of volunteer technical contributions and better leverage network-scale effects.
The reason why our clients don’t know who to choose is because they don’t have the time or the brains to read and understand this article about Stigmergic organization and the economics of information . If they did, we’d all be better for it.
Also, it’s good to point out that a disturbingly large percentage of political campaigns don’t pay their bills, because they lose the campaign.
Losing campaigns with no money is no excuse for shady tech vendors to lie to clients – because the campaign might lose and screw them over in the end!
Even funnier than this site is when a blogger so useless to a campaign that he is relegated to counting adwords money puts on airs that he knows the first thing about tech development. Now that’s funny.
The consultants at M+R Strategic Services did not know the first thing about the social networks. They shot down my ideas and belittled me to the Campaign Manager. Then when the candidate’s daughter flipped out because our opponent had a facebook account I got blamed for not being “on top of that.” Pricks. More harm than good.
I must say that some of these companies are the best community members (in regard to a development community) and I consider several of the participant people my friends. I even worked a little for some of them and it was a pleasure. I saw with my own eyes how hard they work to satisfy the customer. The aforementioned car metaphor is, I believe, closer to the truth than the original post.
Small nonprofits are always fucking over web contractors, too. First they want to find “volunteers” to do skilled technical work and rarely have a clue, much less a plan, about long-term maintenance.
Also, small nonprofits often stiff you on payment when you do ongoing work for them.
If nonprofits want ongoing, functional web sites, then they need to hire and pay appropriately skilled staff. If they don’t have the money to do this: they either need to raise the money or accept they aren’t in the financial league for this sort of service.
Web developers unite against SLAVE LABOR!!!
I was a slave for a candidate. A volunteer whose job it was to try to keep the website’s blog running. The vendor, who shall remain nameless, though it could be thought to be plusfour minus plusone, stiffed us. They broke every deadline and they were only skilled in project management (evasion).
Where the hell is convio? Those fuckers should be on there.
Yeah, those advomatic guys are a bunch of creeps too. They promised me they could make my scoop site better, now all it does is add blocks, pages and blogs. I never know what they are saying and this interweb thing still doesn’t make me coffee.
I hereby put Aaron Welch on notice. How dare you go on vacation.
PS. ALL our scoop converted sites make fresh coffee, using fair trade beans. I don’t know what Dr. Doom is talking about.
You know your coffee is often burned and needs a ton of unrefined sugar, Mordecai. Don’t misrepresent.
I must have talked with a Trellon project manager for 3 months about creating our website, come to find out he didn’t even own a computer and was working on a TI-85. I still don’t know how he was sending email.
Chapter Three, Development Seed, Trellon, Civicactions, Advomatic, and Lullabot are the worst and I hate them all. Just because they raise all this money and get all these people to join web communities to help my candidates no one should give them an inch. When I tell them I want the impossible, I want it yesterday, and I want it beyond perfect, I really don’t care to hear them telling me it can’t be done and don’t understand their big brain computer words like NO, SORRY WE NEVER SIGNED ON TO DO THAT, THAT IS OUTSIDE THE BUDGET or THAT’S REALLY NOT HOW THAT WAS MEANT TO BE USED. These guys should quit building the open source software we all can use for free and go work for the republicans and big business. I switched to kintera and am much happier now – it’s good to be in the sphere.
PlusThree and John Edwards. Launch early and launch often! What a tool.
User Reviews of these companies were just released
From: http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/1218
Which political-technology company does the best job providing a package of campaign tools and services to its clients? According to the nearly 200 people who responded to our online Software-as-a-Service survey, CompleteCampaigns.com ranks highest, with an overall average score of 4.2. Coming in second is ActBlue, with a 3.73 overall score. Third is Democracy in Action, at 3.62. Rounding out the top five are NGP Software at 3.55 and GetActive at 3.29. Powerhouse firms like Convio, Capitol Advantage, Aristotle International, Plus Three and Kintera were all ranked lower by our respondents, who were asked to rate each company that they had worked with on the capacity and reliability of their software, the quality of their service and the fairness of their pricing.
Bulletproof is right. Everyone I’ve ever talked to in the history of the world who has gone to Kintera has loved it because it has saved them so much time: they no longer even bother asking if something cool can be done and done yesterday, because they now no for a fact that it ain’t going to happen. Bullocks to the guys who let us ask silly questions.
And as for all those open source guys who work late nights doing crazy stuff because they love the work their clients do? They should just close up shop and start maintaining Microsoft stuff for RNC, where they’d be bound to get some good lovin’ for all their hard work.
Some web developers are be garbage people, but let’s not forget that nonprofit organizations can be the customers from hell.
Some web developers are garbage people, but let’s not forget that nonprofit organizations can be the customers from hell.
I find it hard to believe that one person has worked with all of these 39 of these firms. Given that, you’re unfairly smearing some folks that you haven’t worked with.
A suggestion: if you’ve had a bad experience (or three) with one or more of these firms – tell us about it. Provide some details.
It might help them improve. It’ll definitely help other potential clients avoid them.
Laying the smackdown on all of these firms isn’t fair, and it doesn’t make you seem credible.
Good lord this thing still exists.
M
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I see most of the review here at from a couple of years ago, but here is one from 2009. I no longer with the firm and this is my personal experience of working with Trellon, which others have mentioned.
My firm contracted with Trellon for a website overhaul. Apparently our contract included uncaring developers, inexperienced project liaisons, no quality assurance or browser compatibility testing and lying bosses. We worked with one project liaison for about 3-4 months who apparently had little background in Drupal and ending up quitting the company with no notice to us at all. (The replacement liaison also not experienced in Drupal.) And if we asked for clarification or simpler explanations (no one at our firm being familiar with Drupal or Drupal jargon), they would complain, saying they’d explained it all before, regardless of whether we could understand it or not.
After trying to explain some edits needed, we ended up doing many of our own mock-ups for them because what they delivered often did not match what we’d described.
Our web team was personally told by the head guy that the developers do not check their work after development and that no one proofs how the design looks, which produced dropped jaws around the table. Almost every mock-up had grammar errors or misspellings, including even our company’s name. Development was done by multiple developers who didn’t check what was done before, as we ended up losing hundreds of pages when they installed a module that overwrote Drupal publishing setting and unpublished those pages. They denied this happened for weeks, and we ended up determining the cause by tracing various tickets and publishing statuses. (The head guy himself had trouble using the WYSIWIG his developers had installed and new developers brought in the middle of the project even complained about prior work done.)
They developed in Firefox, despite IE still being the most commonly used browser, and from what we could tell, never performed browser compatibility until we discovered — through our own efforts — that it was an issue with IE and complained to them about it. And don’t have any add-ons on your Firefox browser, because they apparently need to develop only against a clean Firefox browser.
With the various issues we had to raise with them, Trellon ended up missing three critical deadlines, before eventually demanding payment for all of this great service, and refusing to correct any other glitches.
Worse of all, whenever we raised an issue about a misspelling, browser issue or functionality problem, they would fix it ONLY on the one place we used to show it to them. Having delivered poor content to us in the first place, professionals would have done a quality check to ensure the same issue wasn’t present elsewhere either before sending it back to us again. Misspellings of our name and problems with IE had to be raised multiple times.
No interest in customer service or quality assurance. Never heard a single mea culpa or “Sorry that happened, we’ll get it fixed” – a basic good customer service practice that would have gone a long way with us.