and how do you know it's used that much?
Admittedly, before making a formal business commitment, we wouldn't play 'guess the actual requirements from vague problem descriptions, but:
"his organization has a one large event per year with roughly 1400 volunteers total." suggests the need is highly seasonal and admittedly one month is a bit specific, but you get the idea.
Just so you know how that works, that place already has the site built
Actually, that case was not site development, but I'm well versed with precisely how much work it involved and even given the benefit of their familiarity with the codebase being modified, I'd wager easily it's more work than this question is detailing. It's also work my team could have done, but we were short on time. My team reviewed the code and only accepted it after we were comfortable that we knew the code provided as well as if we had written it ourselves. This is commercial for profit, but also not in the critical path for potential fiscal catastrophy (and I work those scenarios too, and those are a nightmare and warrant high cost, but you can't be so jaded as to assume *every* trivial piece of work should be treated as such).
They want volunteers to write a webapp from the ground up... That's a Major, enterprise level effort.
I get a different read: " 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. " Note that the client seems *relatively* content with what one guy bothered to do in his spare time that was almost certainly done on very short notice, just probably looking for someone to go in and add a field here, or combine two forms there, or something relatively simple like that.
Their existing site is worthless to an incoming developer.
Even with the obvious editorial bias trying to spin it to state that is the case, I just don't get that feeling from the description and my work with non-profits. They probably have a simplistic site that they want to evolve a little, not raze everything to the ground and start over.
I'm sorry, but you clearly have no idea how enterprise projects work
I am very familiar with how enterprise projects work. However you slice it, this is *not* of that pedigree. Small non-profits generally know they get what they pay for and don't have complex needs or unrelenting demands over even trivial cosmetic stuff like is common in enterprise land. There is just a huge world of difference between a production internet presence of an international Fortune 100 company with a labyrinth of inter-departmental nightmares to navigate with a potentially huge revenue amounts, market perception, or liability on the line at any given time and a volunteer sign up site for a local non-profit that only handles about 1,400 volunteers.