Need help with LMS decision....is Moodle that great?

@sarah

If you are planning on having active forums (assuming that's what you mean by chat boards) as crazy as it sounds, Moodle 2.4 still does not allow email subscriptions on one discussion within a forum. (You have to subscribe to the entire forum and thus users would get emails not necessarily related to their specific interests) There's talk about changing forums in 2.5 to a version created by Open University (ForumNG) which allows individual subscriptions per thread, but since you referred to creating a robust community, if you choose Moodle, I think you'd probably want to use something else for the forums part. I think there was one plugin that tried to make an adjustment to standard Moodle forums, but I never heard much about it. You could install the NG plugin from Open University, but they don't have one ready yet for Moodle 2.4. 

In your situation I think Stefano is right on with suggesting Docebo as one possibility if for no other reason you don't need IT to begin with, no upfront costs, and you don't have to worry about total users, but users actively accessing within the last month. The annual Totara license fee (not hosting) is based on number of users and there's a pretty big bump from 3,000 to above that number. 

Todd