Earlier today I had the pleasure of presenting and demonstrating CiviCRM to about 40 people working in the non-profit sector at Connecting Up 2008 (see http://www.connectingup.org)

This year's conference had a strong focus on the use of social media, and today's keynote speaker was Beth Kanter, who is well known as a trainer, blogger and consultant on how non-profits can make best use of social media (http://beth.typepad.com).

Beth's talk was great, and it provided a great context for me to discuss how you can use CiviCRM as a non-profit organisation to capture information about the people who are in the networks of your supporters and "evangelists". For example, the new widgets can enable you to setup a great landing page that you can promote on Facebook, your blog, in comments on photos on flickr or in Twitter messages (tweets).

It also got me thinking that it would be great to be able to write Facebook applications that worked like widgets, showing details of the campaign and progress towards the fundraising goal directly within Facebook...

There was definitely a lot of interest in CiviCRM and half a dozen or so people grabbed me after the presentation to talk more about it.

A couple of features that were asked about were the ability to be able to track replies to standard e-mails sent to contacts through CiviCRM (ie extend the VERP reply addressing to messages sent from the standard (non-CiviMail) e-mail interface) and the ability to cc/bcc your own e-mail address on those e-mails so you have a record in your mail client, not just in CiviCRM (Well, that last request is mine).

The people who had already used CiviCRM spoke extremely highly of the development team and its responsiveness, and noted that the while the release cycle has been a bit hard to keep up with, it is great that so many new features are being added so quickly.

Needless to say we ran out of time far too quickly to cover all the great features of CiviCRM, but hopefully many attendees will jump onto this site and the forums to get more information about the project and the community - as well as try out the demos at http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org or http://joomla.demo.civicrm.org.

Thanks to Lobo and Dave for suggesting I go up to Brisbane to fly the CiviCRM flag - hopefully we can soon welcome a few more members to the CiviCRM community downunder!