Last Thursday, a dozen local CiviCRM users, developers and persons interested in learning about the system met at the NEXUS Resource Center to discuss the Boston CiviCRM training and challenges that we each have faced during implementations. Thank you to the The Green Roundtable for allowing us to utilize their space for this meetup.
I presented on a past project I worked on for the Jane Goodall Institute last year. The presentation brought up a serious gap that many people have identified within the CiviCRM community - an online advocacy tool set that integrates well with the Civi. There are various Drupal modules out there that seek to fill this gap, but there is no one solution that meets the general needs of organizations running online advocacy programs.
Much of the discussion that followed the presentation was focused around existing projects which exist to provide organizations with tools to run online advocacy campaigns. The Petition and Letter modules integrated with past versions of CiviCRM, but I do not believe integrate with current versions. The Activism module is a lesser known but more holistic solution which Trellon developed and released last Fall. There are custom applications being built Will Brownsberger such as CiviEngage which offer grassroots organizing tools for managing field programs. Unfortunately, there are no known projects happening within the Joomla community to provide such tools which we are aware of.
There is a small group of people from the Meetup which have committed to try to develop a set of tools that are more generalized that will provide online advocacy tools for organizations. We have not discussed the details of this project, but we will keep everyone posted as this moves forward.
