The primary source for describing the donor profile and selecting and expanding upon each of the factors for dissatisfaction has been personal opinion and anecdotal experience. This carries the advantage that we can make assertions confidently about the views and needs of the donor, at the cost of not knowing how widely the profile may be applied. Because our view is that the assertions are strongly intuitive, and because we are recommending several changes to a conceptual model, we have preferred a less cumbersome exposition, and for the most part confined supporting data to the appendices. Supporting references for each dissatisfaction factor and other aspects of the donor profile may be found in Appendix D.
Since it has been clear for the ten-year duration of our project that no service already both met our requirements and had strong adoption, we have given a high priority to the independence of our thinking. To that end, almost all supporting references were sourced after compiling our profile and results.
We do endorse the value of more evidence-driven approaches, and would welcome any clarity and confidence they can bring to this area. However, while collating supporting data, we ran into concerns around the quality of reporting methodologies and results that we felt would undermine the strengths of our approach if relied upon too heavily. For this reason, we include references primarily as signposts to other interested and active parties in the research area.