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Ask Slashdot: Event Sign-Up Software Options For a Non-Profit?
New submitter don_e_b writes I have been asked by a non-profit to help them gather a team of volunteer developers, who they wish to have write an online volunteer sign-up site. This organization has a one large event per year with roughly 1400 volunteers total.I have advised them to investigate existing online volunteer offerings, and they can afford to pay for most that I've found so far. In the past two years, they have used a site written by a volunteer that has worked fine for them, but that volunteer is unavailable to maintain or enhance his site this year. They believe the existing online volunteer sign-up sites are not quite right — they feel they have very specific sign-up needs, and can not picture using anything other than their own custom software solution. I am convinced it's a mistake for this non-profit to create a software development team from a rotating pool of volunteers to write software upon which it is critically dependent. How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?
How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?
By not helping them with their custom solution.
Look at CiviCRM (in combination with drupal). Extremely flexible, build for non-profits, completely Open Source.
Pay for your Software support.
If you don't want to help with it, don't help with it and move on. It's not really your problem and you're obviously not the expert on it if you're asking /.
Start with:
Is this software related to our industry?
Do we need some advantage over our competition or can we just use the same stuff they do?
What's our back up plan if we discover that our self created software ends up making the Obamacare website rollout look good?
How much money do you think we will save?
If it ends up costing more money, how much we will sink into this project before quitting?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I've used it to handle large event signups. You can add drop downs, free text fields, etc and pretty much setup any kind of information you need. You can then export the results to a spreadsheet to create name badges, sort by requests, etc as well. They have a free version but it may not allow you as many signups as you need. You can, however, buy a month to month subscription and then drop back to the free one when you don't need it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Have you tried using CiviCRM? www.civicrm.org
If their needs are so specific, they'll necessarily need to pay someone to maintain the software. It sounds like their needs in years past have been filled on a volunteer basis, which leads me to believe that the volunteer has stopped donating his time for a reason.
If they see what their uniqueness costs in dollars instead of karma, they may quickly decide they aren't such a snowflake after all.
The vagueness of this made my eyes hurt - oh and the traditional, "How did this make it to the front page?" Now that's out of the way, if you honestly can find a great product that harnesses all your needs with only a reasonable amount of customization then I'm sure they would be intrigued by it. But as in anything, you need to make a convincing argument. Lots of analysis about the cost/time/training savings that this "out of the box" system would use. However, there's a reason completely custom software exists. It matches the way the business runs not forcing the business to run how some generic software forces them to. I'd be more specific, but your context doesn't allow it.
First off, the question sounds a little whiny. Rather than investigating the best possible solution, the submitter is looking to get his/her way. This is absolutely the wrong approach. The submitter is far more knowledgeable of the situation that any of us. If they cannot even craft an argument for why their approach is best, how are we, who know next to nothing about this project, to be able to come up with one?
As laid out by the submitter, there are two choices:
1. Use already owned and successfully tested software and customize it to the current year's needs.
2. Purchase untested and unfamiliar software and customize it to the current year's needs.
It sounds like going with what you are already familiar with is the way to go. You're going to need to do customization either way to fit into your UX. One solution likely has people who are familiar with it, the other is something completely new. Why wouldn't you stick with what you already know works?
Though the requirements are a bit vague, Google spreadsheets might be able to fit the need. It can be setup to just have a form/questionaire for the volunteers to fill out and then sticks it all into a spreadsheet.
Yes, it is, for a whole host of reasons that I'm sure will be expanded upon here shortly. I've spent 20 years dealing with troubled and failed IT projects, and one of the biggest mistakes I see time and again is an organization trying to create a mission-critical project, often in a compressed time frame, using developers who are not an experienced, functioning team. You can usually throw into that first-time adoption of some silver-bullet technology and/or methodology. So, what you get it, "OK, let's get 10 random programmers who have never delivered a working system together as a team, and they're going to develop this mission-critical system from scratch in 4 months using Swift and Agile, even though none of the programmers have ever used either. And we can add more programmers if we start to fall behind."
Having the programmers be volunteers is even worse, since they are now self-selecting based on their own interest, instead of being chosen for, you know, actual skills, talent, experience, and so on.
Sigh. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
While that is a huge event, I guarantee you they are in no way unique to most other events put on my non-profits. They obviously have money that has been donated to them, they deem is acceptable to waste away instead of going towards their real goals. Perhaps their donors should be made aware of their poor financial decisions.
You state they can afford most off the shelf solutions you've shown them. Key word, "most". If they can't easily afford ALL of those solutions several times over, there is no way they can afford the development of another platform.
Don't give them what they ask for. Give them what they need.
Following this, I am 99% sure that a spreadsheet is sufficient for their actual need. Don't waste time, money, and resources on pie-in-the-sky vaporware. Just get it done.
How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?
I wouldn't. This seems like a trivial project, something you could whip up with Perl/CGI in a few hours. Is there something wrong with the "site written by a volunteer"? Why is the original developer the only one that can "maintain" and "enhance" the site? What exactly needs "maintaining"? Why do you expect that there is an "existing solution" that not only meets their needs but that also costs nothing to "maintain" and "enhance"?
I've noticed a sort of reverse-Not-Invented-Here syndrome recently, where problems that would be trivial to build one-off solutions for are instead solved with huge, unwieldy, general-purpose, off-the-shelf products. It seems the pendulum swings both ways.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
This is how everything made by the DOD starts. We're too cool for COTS!
How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?
Easy, give them a quote. Then let them know that doesn't include support.
I think any developers on slashdot could likewise quote them...
I'm going to say, if I like the charity and am willing to do them a favor: $100k up front, and another $50k on completion if it's relatively simple. Then another $50k per year for support. I can pass background checks and all that stuff.
Oh... so they want, for free, something that would cost at least $200k? And they think their free versions going to be even remotely be equivalent? It's like saying "Well, we could take the buss, but ferrari's are more comfortable. We can't afford a real ferrari so go get us some volunteers and have them custom build a Ferrari from the ground up so we can save money."
It's silly on its face... and if they can't figure that out, I think it's a clear sign how they'll handle the rest of the money they get. Run, don't walk away from that place. This is an important lesson for you not them.
Your job is to inform and advise. Convincing them is not a reasonable task. People making the decision may not do so in a manner you consider rational.
Make your case honestly and to the best of your ability. What someone else does with your input is beyond your ability to control. You have already summarized the key points of the decision reasonable well. Back them up with supporting info and let it go. Ulcers are not fun.
When you depend on an existing third-party solution, the third party can hold you for ransom. (For example, many companies use Oracle's database software, and they're subject to the whims of Oracle as a result.) But by building your own solution, based on open standards, you are free from outside influences and other complications.
Of course, building one's own solution requires a team of developers with well-defined specifications, so that the departure of single developer doesn't threaten the project, and new developers can be brought quickly up-to-speed. Apparently, the mistake made by the non-profit is that they depended on a single developer, and he didn't even document his work.
As a programmer analyst your responsibility is to map the requirements of the customer, assess them and come with a proposal. Your proposal has to either satisfy their requirements or suggest a different course of action. If there are unreasonable requirements it's also your job to bring them back to reality.
Keep in mind that nobody else here understands your customer better than you.
There is nothing wrong with free dev help from crowd sourcing ala http://www.makeadiff.org
Have their custom solution released as an opensource project which they curate.
WordPress: Popular and generally easy to use. Free to download. Can use it to help build a mini site or even use for the full site.
GravityForms: Form management/generation plugin for WordPress. Relatively easy to use. Supports conditional fields, price fields, etc. Stores entries in a database which you can view in the admin, along with email notification support. Costs money, but not much.
There are also other form plugins for WordPress.
Here's a list of 62 volunteer-management packages. Some are web based. Some are free. Somewhere in there should be something that solves your problem.
The details of what they're looking to do is a bit vague, and it depends on what the real requirements are. In other words, this is a two part question, and the choke point is vague...
Part 1: Getting the data in the door.
I'm a huge fan of Machform for this. It's not free, but it's inexpensive, self-hosted on any garden variety LAMP stack, their support folks are pretty good, and making new forms is a very simple process that you can teach Sally Secretary to do in half an hour. You can download the data in a CSV once the form is done and look at it in your spreadsheet flavor of choice.
Part 2: Doing something useful with the data.
So, you've got a spreadsheet full of names, addresses, and phone numbers. What do you do with it? Do you run a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word? nice and easy. Does this go into a SQL database somewhere? Importing it gets interesting, although I think you can export the data from Machform using PhpMyAdmin. Does it need to go into Quickbooks? Good luck with that, although to be fair you'd need half a dozen interns to copy/paste that no matter how you slice it. ConstantContact? I don't know what mass import tools they have, so that can vary. The list of potential use cases goes on and on, and whether this is a practical method or not depends if "data getting into spreadsheet form" is a solution.
It's been said that a well-asked question is half the answer. If you can provide us with more information as to what's done with the data, and where their current solution falls apart, and what specific uniquenesses are limiting the current setup, more solutions may come to light.
https://www.drupal.org/project/cck_signup
They're being lazy, and you're being lazy. Let me give you some real get-shit-done dealing-with-dullards project management 101.
When an organization feels they must use custom developers it's often because of those "unknown unknowns" in the non-existent specification that they want to make up as they go along because they cannot sit down and concentrate long enough to commit it to paper. You should not accept this. If you do, you shouldn't be in this business. Your job is to MAKE them decide on the specifications. If you think it's someone else's job, but nobody is doing the job, then guess what - it's your job, because your job is to do the fucking project correctly.
Mock it up SCREEN BY SCREEN ON PAPER, button by button, every edge case handled. Nail down every field, every possible error condition. Hold meetings with simulations waving bits of paper around to simulate swiping, button clicking, and result pages. Do not stop until you have a "working" piece of software that exists entirely in paper mockup that everyone agrees will solve all their problems. Tell them it is crazy to start coding until you get to this point because it's like starting work on a custom engine before you know if it's going into a car or truck. There is no reason not to do this, and nobody does this, because people are stupid and don't understand how software development works, and they think they can write the spec as they go along and the developers will just adapt and figure it out. It's our fault for being so adaptable on 90% of late-stage feature requests that come through, and it makes us feel like the 10% that kill us are actually our own inadequacies.
Then you write it up formally (as briefly as possible, preferably with shiny pictures or a pop-up book if you can) and you tell them this is the specification. You get signatures. You create an Appendix A that says that any feature request is a change to the scope, and that changes require a new Appendix, and also make them sign something that acknowledges that any appendices may necessitate starting ALL CODING FROM SCRATCH AGAIN, and that if the appendix is added because of something they "forgot" or "didn't think of until they had a chance to actually use the UI" then they take full responsibility for not thinking about the mockups hard enough.
Once that nightmare is over (which should be 3/4 of the cost of the project if you're getting paid), then you try to match their needs to a piece of existing software. Only if they truly have requirements that do not exist do you accept a custom development project.
The rotating pool of volunteers is of far less importance. A shitty implementation and customization of a third-party system can be just as confusing as a custom code project for new volunteers coming in, though arguably slightly less so, so it is certainly preferred.
http://www.volunteerspot.com/
I had made a very simple attendance tracker tailored exactly for an event using web2py, its database admin interface was useful for the last minute requests from PHB, and its web app nature was perfect for multi user concurrent operations. It is possible, but I would not do them with the default sqlite db. Use postgres.
For medium and heavy traffic, mind that, while very easy to deploy, web2py needs little tweaks to improve performance and avoid session files filling up disk space. The documentation is superb if you have familiarity with web app concepts, retro compatibility ensures that new versions do not break existing apps. There are other frameworks too. A web app with a sane framework will make it easy for new programmers to modify stuff.
Delegate the difficult part of the system you need. If you delegate dealing with security, registrations, username, passwords, verification mails, security, etc the sign-up system get very simplified. Perhaps you would like to consider Stormpath ( https://stormpath.com/ ). They provide security, dealing with users, passwords, assign those users to groups and controlling all the security stuff, mailing, etc. It integrates with google, facebook, etc. I think it costs $49 at month, but they have a free full version with enough calls to serve 1400 users registrations. No sure they language you are considering, they support PHP and Java (and other languages). That + a cheap hosting site and perhaps some solution using wordpress (PHP) would result in a very simple application that junior programmers could code.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to be the registration chair for a national event, which we successfully held this spring. All previous events had been run strictly on paper-and-pencil mail-in forms, but that involves a lot of manual work, including a lot of last minute work at the event door. I looked long and hard at various open source and commercial event management offerings, and I spoke to other people who ran similar events. Based on recommendations from other event organizers, I landed on regonline as a good blend of features and customizability, even though it was a bit expensive (though they offer a discount for a 501(c)(3) organization.) What it came down to for me was effort. I wouldn't have time to set up all the hosting needed, to install and configure the software, or to integrate with a payment gateway, and I got a lot of really valuable features from their system. I didn't want us to make our attendees suffer through hour-long lines at a registration booth. And I was able to provide instant reports to the conference chair, who used them to help run the event smoothly.
Something it sounds like you need to do here is figure out "who is the Registration Chair"? If it's you, your only question to the Event Chair should be "what is my budget?" Base your solution on the bottom line. If your budget is $5/registrant, and it includes lanyards and ID cards, your options are wide open. If your budget is $0.50/registrant, and you have to use a box of old "Hello my name is..." stickers, your options are a bit more limited. The important thing is: the Registration Chair is in charge of registration. He or she decides how to best solve the problem, not "here are some random developers, you must write us a site."
One thing that still isn't clear is why you would have to "write" a new site. It sounds like you created one a few years ago, and then another, and then another. I realize your group is a precious snowflake, completely unique in the world, but events really are just events. They all have web sites, registrants, admins, venues, agenda items, merchandise, travel, lodging, taxes, payments, receipts, badges, volunteers, and reports. And there is nothing in that list you can't get from the marketplace. Ultimately, if you absolutely can't use a packaged solution because of [illogical rationale], you should only need to have someone reconfigure the existing site. That's a lot less effort, perhaps not much more than c/2014/2015/g
Finally, if you're taking payments on line, you're going to run into extra effort and risk to interface with them. No matter what, you really, really don't want to be responsible for someone else's credit cards. Not these days. The risk is more than you can imagine. If that's something you can foist off on a third party, you'll keep a ton of liability out of your organization.
John
You might not even have to start from scratch. I'd wager that ACT (A Conference Toolkit) could be customized to fit their specific needs. ... but they still haven't explained why it is that Event Brite or Brown Paper Tickets wouldn't work for them, other than expense. I guess they just assume that volunteer programmers are 'free' vs. the opportunity cost.
If nothing else, you then don't expose yourself to some security mistake because you rushed to put something together. Or some other simple mistake, like the conference I attended where everything was managed by e-mail ... only it seems their hosting service got flagged as a spam relay, and over 50% of the e-mail never went through. (so the organizers never got many people's talk proposals, and they had to scale back the meeting from 3 days to 2).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
especially a "free" one ("you're the product..."). There's an organization near me that uses Eventbrite to manage its event scheduling. I hate putting personal info into that, which is then used for tracking and spamming. Similarly I refuse to use Meetup. Various events near me are posted to Meetup, I look at the listings and I just show up at the ones that look interesting, without any advance signup. That hasn't caused any problems yet, but I can understand why the organizations would like to know in advance who is coming, and I wouldn't mind telling the organization directly, I just don't want to share the info with "social media" douches who want to track the activities of everyone in the world.
I don't care who writes the code but this type of service should only be run directly by the organization itself (say on a 1 dollar per month VPS) so that information is not spilled to third parties.
There are a lot of good Joomla tools. DT Register (http://www.dthdevelopment.com/) is quite flexible and won't put too much of a punch into a non-profit's wallet. I'm also with a non-profit with LOTS (600+) of volunteers to schedule. We handle attendees, volunteers, vendors, and sponsors through that single system. To support volunteer management, we use fabrik (http://fabrikar.com/) and (I stress) minimal custom PHP, where needed, to handle the volunteer assignment management; fabrik itself will handle much of the layout and backend database tasks. I was able to pass managing DT Register on to someone else this year with little effort for either of us. If you want further info, our URL is https://www.clawinfo.org/ (site may be NSFW...no pr0n, but we're a bit kinky and gay); there's a contact us in the site menu.
Eventbrite.
They should only go with custom code up to a certain extent. The organization should have the freedom to choose its own service provider (including volunteers). I'm probably stating the obvious, but if there is too much custom code they will be forced to spend a lot to rewrite code when volunteers rotate (and most likely will want to roll their own fancier solution), spend a lot of energy/time/money to maintain the code, or have difficulties finding volunteers who want to get involved in such a mess.
I don't know the specifics of your use-case, but CiviCRM is a Free Software contact relationship management software aimed specifically at non-profits. It has a large community of users and developers. While the community mostly operates on non-profit budgets, it includes users such as the FSF, EFF, Wikimedia, sub-orgs of UNESCO, Amnesty International, NY State Senate, etc. I use it for my small local clients, but I'm happy to be able to pool ressources with such organisations.
While turn-key tools can only do so much, you would probably have better chances of customizing that to fit your needs, and in the long term, the organization can turn to specialized service providers if necessary, without restarting from scratch.
Heck, worst case, if your volunteers are PHP-averse and don't feel like spending too much time customizing the application, you can write just a front-end application to it, and use the CiviCRM REST API to store the data. Writing a whole new application just for that seems like a huge waste of ressources, and does not seem sustainable. An event management tool has a ton of small but critical features to think about.
If they think it will be hard to learn an existing generic tool, imagine how hard it will be for new staff/volunteers to use a completely custom tool. Not to mention that if your organisation has an aim of promoting common good, community building, etc, they should also participate in existing Free Software projects :)
Have they checked into https://civicrm.org/extensions/civivolunteer ? I've never used it but according to that page its being used by 366 sites currently, so that means it has some value. I have worked as a contractor for a handful of non-profits and they use CiviCRM (the CRM that civivolunteer is an extension of) to manage their contacts. I can't say it does everything exactly how I'd want it to, but it does allow heavy customization through native extensions, and does expose hooks to several CMS's (drupal, wordpress, joomla) if they need to customize the user facing side of the data.
> How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?
The 2 core beliefs are:
1) We are so special
2) We know what we want
Neither of these assumptions are true. But, you know that already.
The best course of action is to get a simple program and get them to use that. Get them to use it the standard way first. With sufficient training and motivation, they may be able to use last year's program.
After that, the event will have started and everyone will be too busy to do anything else.
95% of all projects like this, including in large corporations, would have cost less overall if they had just used index cards in metal boxes.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Event signup (free)
https://www.eventbrite.com/
Have them start with that, and then ask them what does or doesn't work.
Then, estimate labor to build, maintain, and support custom work.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
The So Cal Linux Expo and Texas Linux Fest both use scalereg for attendee + staff registration. It can probably be customized to meet your needs without too much effort. (Note, I'm the primary scalereg author.)
http://www.signupgenius.com/
I am currently a student and trying to find ways to volunteer is software engineering. While this particular case may not be the best for this particular non-profit, where do developers typically find non-profits to volunteer for?
That's the problem. Maybe they have fields that are not available on any of the other sites. Maybe they want to run reports off the site. Let me tell you what I think their goal probably is: A few weeks before the event, they want to lock the registration, get a report of all registrants, when they get in, when they leave, if they have any dietary restrictions, who requests lodging. Then they give that to their office manager who starts contacting local hotels and caterers.
I wrote a web-based event management program a few years ago on a LAMP plus JavaScript. It's been rock-solid and has handled thousands of registrants. Having said that, here's the way to determine if their needs are truly specific (you're going to need a management module and a registrant facing module):
1) What fields do they want to display to registrants? To event planners? Problem here: clients don't know what they want till they start playing with the site.
2) What fields do they want registrants to fill in after they click on the invitation link and reach the registration page? Do registrants request lodging? Do they arrive on different days? Do they leave on different days? Do they have dietary restrictions?
3) How will registrants be allowed to edit their information until the "lock" date? Probably a combination of unique pin generated for them, plus their email address.
4) How do they want to contact the registrants and ask them to sign up? The site I created created a custom URL for each event, and they were mailed to the invitees for that event. So, you create the event, and you email all the registrants (in the BCC field) with the link.
5) You're getting PII - personally identifiable information. You need a secure server. You'll need an SSL certificate to encrypt the connection.
Fortunately, your organization has a few years of experience with this. So they know what they want to do generally. That's a very big deal - a client who actually knows what he wants.
THEN - you can check out some of the available commercial options, or see if they really need something from scratch.
Don't convince them write a static html page with frames or iframes to survey monkey and call it done. Tell them it'll take a couple of weeks to test and debug and then upload it to their volunteer signup URL.
:))
BTW, this is the classic ROI conundrum. The work used once a year will NEVER payoff, but you just can't convince some customers of that. :/
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
> How would you convince them to abandon their plan to dive into project management and use an existing solution?
I wouldn't. Pushing for "your" solution rather than the right solution is being a fan, not a professional.
I would instead work with them to come up with a list of requirements. Note that that a requirements document is needed in order to do either correctly - to either build or buy, you need to know what features the solution needs to have. Applying a "checkbox" style to the list might be a good idea, to visually emphasize that the right solution is that one that checks off all of these needs.
Then with the requirements list in hand, you look at each option - the existing one, off-the-shelf solutions, and a schedule / quote to build a a custom solution.
If an off-the-shelf solution meets al of the requirements, you show them that - here's the list of 20 things we figured out you need, and this solution checks off all 20 boxes. If no off-the-shelf solution can check off all of the boxes, you ask if any of them can be customized to check off all of the boxes. If not, you must either build custom or revise your requirements.
This process will find the right solution, rather than convincing them to do it your way, against their better judgement. Remember, there's at least 50/50 chance that you're wrong. The other people are just as likely to be right as you are. Listing the requirements as a checklist will answer the question, in a clear, convincing way.
I once asked a couple of friends who'd heard me argue a proposal whether they thought I had done a good job arguing my view. They surprised me when they answered by shrugging and saying "well, you were right. I don't think you did a god or bad job of convincing us, it just became clear that your view is correct." When you present a clear set of facts showing which way is right, you don't need to "convince" anyone to do it "your way", you've simply demonstrated which way is in fact the right way to go.
I wish you luck with that my friend. I have done a lot of work in the public/non-profit secor and have found one thing to be true. You can use all the logic, data, metrics, graphs, and pie charts the world has to offer and not get the management to change on an issue. Unless you can make them think it is their idea.
let their sales team handle the rest? One I've worked with in particular is Payscape Advisors. They have a managed software solution built for customized registration type processes (camps, after school activity, sports, etc) called RegPoint. They've been getting some good reviews lately and I know they are planning on increasing the development team size soon. Unless they are planning on selling the software they are trying to develop to their direct competitors I, personally, think that custom solutions are not really necessary especially since it's for only one event a year.
https://eventuosity.com/
This is my friend's business. I've never used it. But he's smart, entrepreneurial, and has spent a lot of time on it. Might be worth a look.
It's not your job to convince them to abandon their plan and use an existing solution. It's your job to either do as they've requested you, or inform them that while you're flattered they'd ask you to fill the shoes of Volunteer X that you're not the tool they need to fix this problem. Then, if they ask you why, you can tell them your opinion that they really need to go with an existing solution. Or they can find someone who will do what they want.
Then they will see the error of their ways.
Other than that... just walk away.
is this bumbershoot? I hope the software I left behind for this same situation still isn't being used :(
Cvent's event management tools offer everything you can imagine and then some. Well worth the cost.
If you don't know how to convince them they're doing it wrong, what makes you so sure they're doing it wrong?
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I have used CiviCRM and recommend it for the situation you describe. Among other things, the CiviVolunteer module is being improved rapidly. CiviCRM can do things like track time for different kinds of jobs, etc. It also has a strong CiviEvent module that can track registrations, etc. If you are organized, and test it first, you can set up tablets at the check-in tables that feed directly into the CiviCRM setup. (Test that first and be sure you have reliable internet, etc.)
While CiviCRM is a cousin to Drupal, CiviCRM is increasingly being used by organizations who use Wordpress for their website, not Drupal. Pairing it with Drupal allows one to use Drupal Views to display the CiviCRM info in custom ways. Wordpress doesn't offer that flexibility. But if you seek basic but solid functionality now, and likely improved integration with Wordpress later, then CiviCRM with Wordpress can work fine.
I strongly recommend talking to a consultant to plan and to get it set up for you for the first time. Then your people can learn by doing. If they are capable of writing custom software, they can learn and use CiviCRM.
License: "GNU Affero General Public License 3 (GNU AGPL 3) and the CiviCRM Licensing Exception."
Frankly, when I here "we have unique demands" I ask for clarification an detain gently guid ether to the determination they are not a unique as they think.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Speaking of unfinished jobs...?
Hey, that's authentic spell checker gibberish. At least $10 worth at current rates.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I have used this with local Apache events and they have not charged a fee. Presumably they would extend that courtesy to your not-for-profit organization as well.
1) Generate/request a list of requirements for the SW.
2) Evaluate existing options and report which ones support the requirements.
If there aren't any existing packages that match the requirements, there are a few choices:
a) Pay someone to enhance an existing package to add the missing features.
b) Write a new system from scratch
I would guess that (a) is going to be a lot cheaper than (b) provided you start with a system that's a reasonable match. Presumably if the non-profit has (or thinks they have) enough cash to pay for a new system from scratch, then paying the owner of an existing system to enhance it (or people to enhance an existing Open Source solution) should be less...
Equally, you might start with the existing system they're using. Surely since that was custom written for them it's pretty close to their requirements, so enhancing/maintaining it would be cheaper than writing a whole new system from scratch.
From your posting, it sounds like you've started out with the assumption that the existing product they have can't be maintained or improved.
It also sounds like you don't have any idea why they like it is so much.
One of the things someone will have to balance is the need to have a programmer learn how the existing code works, in order to modify it as necessary (and programmer time is expensive) vs. the need to retrain all of the volunteers to use a completely new system (volunteers may be in limited supply, and training them may be even more expensive).
Some questions which your post raises:
1) Why would they need a TEAM of volunteer programmers to replace a single programmer from before? Do they have to rewrite the entire thing from scratch? Are there lots of new features to add?
2) You mentioned that they can afford to pay for the new software packages you found. Why not just pay to hire one programmer to make the enhancements/changes they'd like this year?
My own experience is that I've often been the programmer hired to make something work, and sometimes it wasn't all that hard.
I've also been the guy who had to modify/configure a canned system and make it do what the client actually wants -- sometimes it can be easy and other times exceedingly difficult/expensive.
I'm surprised that you haven't done your research yet to learn what features your clients need and WHY.
What are you bringing to the table besides your preconceived opinions?
Perhaps you should turn down this project, because it doesn't fit what you know -- the client might be better off working with someone who is more open minded and actually understands their needs better.
I wouldn't hire bruce in a million years.
I would say get a good web2py developer. They could probably do most if not all of this in under an hour if you carefully layout the specs. Design can be had from the South Americas through elance at a discount. Web2py devs could easily implement the layout into your app. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this. There's nothing faster, development wise, or more readable to future volunteers or devs.
Not happy with Eventbrite ticketing process (recent purchase of tickets). EventBrite emailed me some PDFs, and the event asks me to print paper tickets. But the PDF is in US Letter format instead of A4 (which the rest of the world uses). After a lot of fiddling with printer settings, I can print but the printout is one big black block – not enough lettering visible to identify it as a ticket. EventBrite have abused PDF format or just did it badly.
I would definitely DISrecommend Eventbrite to anyone who wants to run a pain-free event.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Penguicon.org http://penguicon.tuxtrax.org volunteer development for a once a year event.