E-xemplar: We Want The Public Option

03:35 PM Jun 24, 2009

Great stuff happens when you mix a tool kit like Salsa with a creative campaign concept.

Case in point: WeWantThePublicOption.com

This custom-built petition page offers signers the prospect of their name appearing on an advertisement that will air in the D.C. area in favor of the public option. It's a great way to show impact from an online petition as well as recognize the activists that sign it. And as you can see, it's clearly all about the cause -- not the sponsoring organization, which is practically invisible on the page.

So, how would one build a page like this? On the technical side, they've used our robust API to create a custom form that populates signers into particular groups. This does require working at the level of the code, but it's nothing more complex than HTML, The same process could just as easily be used to register people for Salsa events, apply Salsa tags, or create any other kind of headquarters data. While they could have hosted this type of page themselves, they've chosen to place it on a Salsa content page so that we pay the bandwidth freight when they get picked up by BoingBoing. Either way is fine by us.

The overall layout and design of the page itself, of course, are wholly custom jobs that Salsa doesn't directly facilitate. Once you've got a design, however, it's a simple matter of including the HTML in the layout of the custom page.

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