CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

I've been working on a CiviCRM implementation for a client for the better part of 6 months on my own free time (primarily configuration with occasional small tweaks via hooks etc as I become more familiar with the product.  I have recently come to the point where my client needs a couple non-trivial customizations that I am not capable of doing myself. 

I am curious to know if any of the professionals (freelancers or organizations) out there use a job posting/bidding service (such as elance.com, freelance.com, ifreelance.com) for seeking work and matching jobs to workers?  I have had some success through contacting service providers directly on the consulting page of civicrm.org but it can be time-consuming when trying to shop around for quotes and explaining the project multiple times etc.

I am asking this for personal reasons (i.e. if I find there is a site with a high concentration of Civi pros I might post a project there) but also to make a point; for better or worse, many of the users of CiviCRM are not-for-profits or have limited budget for customization so would benefit from getting a few professionals out there to bid on the work, hopefully getting the right balance of quality/cost/delivery timeline.  As more and more professionals include CiviCRM in their portfolios, it will improve the competition and in time produce better Civi implementations.

Any thoughts?

PS - I also recognize that this might raise some hackles on the topic of appropriate pricing of professional services which some folks have complained about before elsewhere in the forums.  I'm not of that camp - I am a .net professional by day and think it is completely reasonable to charge $50/hr or more for professional service, I'm just sensitive to my own client's situation where they couldn't afford my "day job" rate so I end up charging a low rate and occasionally do work pro bono or for donation-in-kind receipts.  A project bidding service helps them minimize their costs.

You could try to do a post on the LinkedIn group CiviCRM professionals?