Partner Program Pre-Launch Survey Results

When the TYPO3 GmbH was founded, one of the products planned was an official TYPO3 partner program, scheduled for the first half of 2017. To make good on that promise, we are currently working hard on the concepts and design of that program. One of our goals is to improve the quality of projects out in the wild as well as providing potential clients with help to find approved quality partners.

To involve our founding members right from the start we sent out a survey at the beginning of January asking for opinions on our basic concept - and what they’d expect from a partner program. Nearly 40% of all TYPO3 Association members participated - thank you!

From those participants more than half identified themselves as full-service agencies, another 18% as development agency. Take note: Only one (1) hoster participated.

For the first step of the partner program we are therefore focusing on agencies as potential partners.

The next part of the survey was constructed to figure out what kinds of benefits our partners expect. We took a look around the market, looked at similar products (open source as well as proprietary) and came up with a list of potential benefits we could offer. Here are the top 5 benefits as voted in our survey:

For the requirements part of the survey, we first asked participants to name requirements “from the top of their head” instead of providing pre-selected choices, so we could see what people would come up with. The most named requirements were:

• Community Contribution
• Association Membership
• Number of certified employees

After that we provided a list - again collected from other systems’ partner program - and asked which of these partners should fulfill:

After the survey, we used the results to further shape the concept of the partner program. 

One of the last questions gave participants who also funded the TYPO3 GmbH the possibility to tell us if they would be willing to take part in an interview about the TYPO3 Partner Program. More than 60 people were willing to do so. As it would be nearly impossible to interview all of them, as a first step we selected eight of them and conducted detailed interviews on the refined concept at the end of January.

The information from these interviews will now be consolidated and taken into account. When the concept is finalized it will be presented to the public and a beta phase will start.

In general we are happy about the interest in the partner program.