CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi - yes this is a typical and hard question and it will be interesting to see range in the replies you get ;-)

There are a number of clarifications that you can probably provide to help reduce the 'what ifs'

Memberships
- what does this involve (any weirdness like 'oh but they can't just 'become' a member, they need board approval')
- how should renewals work (discounts, behaviours during 'grace' period, etc)
- are the all 'single' or are their related/inherited members

Events
- are bookings individual or can people book multiple places and any 'oddness' if you do allow the latter
- what sort of information needs to be collected about events beyond the obvious 'contact' data
- anything special like 'oh we want to have a gallery of photos for each event' (since that recently came up)

Payment Processing
- who will you be using for this
- are you needing to deal with recurring payments

Accounts linkage
- are we talking 'accounts package' eg MYOB, Xero etc or 'user accounts'
- if user accounts, are there different levels of users to be based off certain civi criteria

Volunteer management
- this really is a piece of very stretchy string ;-)
- provide some scenarios and clarify if they are likely to become more convoluted than at first sight

Hope that helps get you some more meaningful responses.

When I get a chance, I'll write up some more detailed requirements. Thanks for replies to date.

I am hoping that cost can be minimised through the use of in-house effort by technically knowledgeable people under the guidance of a CiviCRM expert and following designs developed in collaboration with this expert.

Hey there, reading my post again, it sounds a bit opinionated, but hopefully it is helpful advice.

IMO having in-house people work on CiviCRM is a very good for your org, since it builds up skills and knowledge internally, and you know your organization best.  It does save you money in the long term, and allows you to be more ambitious and effective long term (as long as the staff stay around) but I wouldn't be confident that it will save you money in the short term (maybe break even medium term) since even though they are technically knowledgeable, and will be able to work in collaboration with the expert, there will be a lot of learning to do, and they'll likely learn from mistakes, etc., hence it will be slower (but potentially much better)

If I were choosing an organisation to work with in this way, I would want to get a few references for organisations that they already work with in this way, since experience working in this way counts for a lot. Some consultancies prefer to do everything with their own team who know each other and work well together, and so aren't experienced in the dynamics of sharing the team with the client.  And it can also be hard for your internal  if they haven't worked like this much before. (e.g. things like "you said it would be ready by X date, we didn't plan in time to do this now, so we can't do it now until Y date". Or "Since you have done it this way, it is going to put the budget up by X since we were expecting it to be done this other way").  This probably just boils down to good project management and communication, but if people don't have a good track record of working like this, there will likely a few more bumps along the way.

Michael