I'm giving another introductory talk on CiviCRM at this year's Drupaldelphia. In the past year, there have been some noteworthy developments for CiviCRM. Let's start with some of the basics.
What is CiviCRM?
Well, with a spiffy new website, you can learn all about it at civicrm.org. Short answer is that it is an open source constituent relationship management system. It's a tool to help manage information and connections with different types of contacts an organization may have. It can be configured to do mass emailing, take online donations, sell tickets and manage events, and much more!
Now compatible with WordPress
In addition to the new website, one of the big developments with CiviCRM is that it can now be integrated with WordPress. CiviCRM must be integrated with a content management system and previously Joomla and Drupal were the only supported CMSes. Along with extending integration to WordPress, CiviCRM extended support for Drupal 6 in addition to Drupal 7, which was a huge relief as many nonprofits are still on Drupal 6 (and likely will be for some time).
Growing community in Philly
There have already been two quarterly meetups this year in Philly. The local community continues to grow to include nonprofit organizations like the Notebook and Prometheus Radio Project as well as small community groups like the South Philly Food Co-op.
Beyond that the planning and overview docs from last year remain relevant. I'll update this with feedback and questions from the talk tomorrow.
Edited to add: Here's the drupal.org page with details about CiviCRM extensions for things like views, cck, and organic groups.
Thanks to everyone who attended the talk! Let me know if you have any other questions or want to research/work on any issues together.