We had our first Greater Chicago area CiviCRM Meetup at 6 pm on Thursday February 10th at the offices of Emphanos at TechNexus and had 6 people in attendance.

Topics we covered:

• Merits of CiviCRM versus Salesforce.com and Microsoft Access for non-profits
• Creative and uncommon uses of CiviCRM for different workflows
• Overview of CiviCRM's capabilities (presentation by Mary Kay Bianchi)
• Discussion about hosting a reception introducing Cloud computing and CiviCRM for non-profits in the Chicagoland area, planning and generating an invitation list
• Discussion about promoting the upcoming Chicago CiviCon 2011 conference
• Discussion on the CiviAccounts Make-it-happen campaign
• Discussion about our next official meetup towards the end of March

We'd like to acknowledge SNtial Technologies for sponsoring the pizza and Emphanos for providing refreshments.

Hope to see you at the next meetup on March 25th, 2011!