CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Juan,

I think this would be a good question for the CiviCRM Stack Exchange Q&A site. You will probably get more responses there:
http://civicrm.stackexchange.com/

As someone who works for a CiviCRM service provider, and from talks with other services providers, this topic comes up often.

On the administrative side, I think anyone with management experience and who is comfortable with technology can adapt to CiviCRM. We see it all the time with our clients, as we train their staff to use CiviCRM as a management tool. In the projects I work on, we train some clients to manage their own custom fields, activity/case types, webforms.

Finding programmers is harder, but you might not need one. Sometimes people with an "accidental techy" background can understand enough PHP to help debug some issues (interact on the CiviCRM issue tracker, github). An advantage of Drupal is also being able to do a lot of things with components that can be configured using the interface (ex: Views, Webforms, Rules). CSS/theming also gets easier with time, and no need to be a Drupal expert to get into theming (I like using Bootstrap-based themes, since a lot of people outside the Drupal community are familiar with it). If you really need a programmer, I would look for any PHP programmer and train them.

There's hope!

Mathieu