CiviCRM, the free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector went from strength to strength in 2011. 2020Media has been providing CiviCRM hosting for several years for organisations small and large. Hosting plans with integrated “zero-click” installs of CiviCRM start at £100 per year. Read more about CiviCRM Hosting.
Planned CiviCRM improvements for 2012
- Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration
- CiviMobile – CiviCRM for mobile devices
- CiviSMS – SMS blasts and interactions
- Mass Dedupe and Merge – Batch merging for groups of duplicate contacts
- Multiple membership renewal reminders
- Relative date filters for all search forms
- UK Direct Debit Integration
These planned improvements rely on donations to the core development team, so if you can donate anything at all to help ‘make it happen’, you can do so at http://civicrm.org/mih. You can choose the specific feature you want to target so it’s very clear how your donation gets results.
Let’s a take a detailed look at these 2012 CiviCRM features
Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration
This feature is the first step towards enabling better integration of accounting concepts and systems with CiviCRM. It implements a number of data changes to make further enhancements possible, as well as providing Quickbooks integration via IIF file export (and integration with other packages via CSV export)
CiviMobile
CiviCRM for mobile devices. This includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also have the ability to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in.
CiviSMS
Support for SMS blasts and interactions, targeting the following features:
- Broadcast an SMS message with token support to a group of contacts via workflows similar to Send Email and CiviMail
- Collect responses from the above message and associate it with the message and the sender
- Validate and store the response as a survey answer
- Integrate with multiple SMS gateways – ClickaTell, Twilio and Tropo
Multiple membership renewal reminders
Administrators will be able to configure an unlimited number of reminders at specified dates relative to the membership expiration, and configure different message templates as needed for each reminder.
UK Direct Debit Integration
Requirements and specification are being developed here:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Direct+Debit+integration+%28UK%29+requirements+and+specification
Will allow UK based non profits to connect to a UK based direct debit provider and process recurring direct debit payments.
The regular monthly meetup of the London Joomla 
David Bain, an internet marketing expert who uses WordPress in his work, talked about getting your WordPress website noticed in the search engines. David talked us through his 
Keith Devon gave us a great introduction to Custom Post Types, which was very useful for the new developer or designer. Simply put, setting up Custom Post types allows you to add a new section to the admin menu for a adding content to a specific type of page that you design. For example if you had staff profiles, you can create a page entry that has boxes for their name, position and job description, and then on the front end display this in a particular way. 