Thank you to everyone who completed our FME Community 2024 User Survey!

We’ve been listening closely to the FME Community, and we’re excited to share the results of our recent user survey. 

Your feedback is invaluable in guiding our ongoing efforts to create a valuable and engaging platform. In this post, we'll delve into the key findings, explore what they mean for the future of the community, and outline the steps we're taking to implement your suggestions.

Key Findings

We received valuable insights from nearly 300 FME community members. Our data reveals a strong, engaged community with a clear desire for knowledge sharing and problem-solving. 

The most popular FME Campus features are the forums, Knowledge Base, and FME Academy. Users primarily engage with the community weekly or monthly and appreciate how it has positively impacted their professional development.

User Demographics

A significant portion of our community has been active for 2-5 years (29.12%) or 5-10 years (24.90%).

Motivations for Joining

The primary motivations for joining the FME Community are getting help with FME, learning more about FME (both beginners and experienced users), and connecting with other users (through knowledge sharing and getting help).

Engagement

Users primarily engage with the community and FME Campus through the forums, Knowledge Base, and FME Academy. Email notifications are the preferred method for staying updated. Users primarily engage on a weekly or monthly basis. User Conferences are the most popular community event.

Benefits

The community has been instrumental in professional development for nearly 70% of users.

Participation

Learning from others, getting help with specific problems, and seeing how others use FME are the top reasons for participation.

Overall, the data suggests that the FME Community is driven by a desire for knowledge and improvement. Users come to the community to learn from others' expertise and experience, to solve their own problems, and to stay up-to-date on the latest FME techniques.

How to Describe the FME Community

Participants were asked how they would describe the FME Community to another user. The top themes were:

• Knowledge and Support: This is the most prominent theme. Users describe the community as a valuable resource to learn about FME, find solutions to problems, and get help from other users.
• Helpfulness and Friendliness: The community is described as friendly, helpful, welcoming, and collaborative.
• Resourceful and Informative: Many users find the community to be a rich source of information, with forums, articles, training materials, and discussions about various FME applications.
• Active and Engaging: The community is seen as active, with helpful users and experts willing to share their knowledge and answer questions. 

Overall, the FME Community is seen as a positive and valuable resource for users of all experience levels.

What You Want to Learn About

Here’s what users said they’d like to learn more about on the community:

• Common troubleshooting issues
• Workflow how-tos
• Building workbenches
• Custom transformers
• Python scripting
• Specific use cases
• Tips and tricks, best practices, and workarounds
• FME updates, developments, and future changes
• And more!

If there’s a topic you want covered in the community or through a blog post, webinar, or Knowledge Base article, submit it here.

Common Feedback

In addition to the insights shared above, we also received a range of feedback on things you’d like to see new or done differently in the FME Community.

Here’s some of the common themes:

• Content: Update old content, add resources for transformers, improve search functionality, provide data best practice guides and industry-specific case studies and success stories.
• Product Releases: Provide in-depth articles on new features.
• User Interface: Improve navigation, reduce spam, and consider a dark theme.
• Ideas: Increase activity from Safe staff, improve feedback mechanisms for user ideas.
• Community Engagement: More regional gatherings, allow workspace sharing, recognize active members.
• Others: Offer projects for practice, provide more resources on custom transformers, content for different experience levels, including advanced tips and tricks.

Action Steps

We’ve taken your feedback to heart and have already made several improvements to the FME Community: 

• You can now edit a post past the 60 minutes mark
• Since switching to the new community platform, we’ve automated the Ideas Board and explained how the process works here
• The FME Lizard was removed from the leaderboard
• We’ve launched our Question of the Week and will be exploring other ways to connect you with users in your niche, industry, or region
• You can now receive a badge on the FME Community every time you complete a course or certification on the FME Academy
• We explained how you can earn points and badges on the community here

But we’re not stopping there! In the coming months, we’re excited to introduce new features and enhancements based on your suggestions.

Keep your eye out for: 

• In-person meetups hosted by Safe Software across North America
• More information around product release and enhancements
• Celebrating user contributions beyond badges and points
• Opportunities to share content specific to an industry or niche including success stories, case studies, and best practices
• Rewards for reporting spam, finding bugs, and broken links
• Increasing efficiency in answering questions

If you didn’t get a chance to complete the survey, it is still open here. As always, you can also share feedback on the community on this feedback form or by emailing community@safe.com.