Who We Are: A Statistical Self-Portrait of the Dynamics CRM User Group

At the December meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I announced and encouraged members to fill out an online survey. It was a pretty simple survey, with questions on where members are located, what job roles they hold, what kind of organizations they work for, and the like. I also wanted to use the survey to get some guidance on what kinds of session topics were more (or less) popular.

The survey questions were pretty simple, but I thought the results were interesting. In the month after the session, we got 23 respondents, and I will report the aggregated results in this article.

From a Dynamics CRM perspective, the interesting thing about the survey is that I implemented it within Dynamics CRM. The step-by-step how-to of implementing a survey in Dynamics CRM is actually quite interesting, and absolutely worth a separate article.

For now, the actual survey results will have to suffice, so here you go!

What Certifications Do We Have?

We are definitely a well-certified group. I asked which of the Dynamics CRM 4.0 core certification exams people had passed, and here are the results:

70% of us have passed the Applications exam, 48% the Customization exam and 39% Installation/Deployment. The Applications exam was by far my favorite, too: In fact, I liked it so much I took it twice!

Where Do We Live?

Wow. 17% of us are from Europe or Asia-Pacific., and a bare plurality from my home time zone.

Who Do We Work For?

That’s a good mix: two-thirds of us almost equally split between end-customers and MS partners with the rest from ISVs, non-MS partner consulting firms and the “other” category.

What Do We Do?

Not surprising that a majority of our members are IT Professionals, but I was pleasantly surprised with how well sales, marketing and management are represented.

What Kinds of Presentations Do We Want?

These are averages of all responses. The three options were each ranked on a 1-5 scale, 1 being “Most preferred”, 5 least. No doubt Edward Tufte would object to my graphical display of the quantitative information in question, and he’d be right. But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. So just remind yourself that the average of “2″ for Technical sessions indicates a higher preference than the “2.95″ for Introductory.