Salsa Scoop

Some FAQs on Donation Pages

With the end of the year upon us, many organizations are doing heavy fundraising pushes and creating new donation pages. To help you in your fundraising journey, I present to you the 9 most frequent questions we've received in the past month. As always you can check SalsaCommons.org for additional information. Happy organizing!

1. When I visit my donation page, why do I see a broken lock image in my Firefox and Chrome browser (or, in IE, this very intimidating security error)?

Salsa’s donation pages are “secure”—meaning that transactions are made through an encrypted connection. However, all browsers will display a warning or an icon to caution users when they visit a secure page that contains unsecure elements, such as an image or stylesheet residing at an address beginning with http://, rather than https://. You don't have to worry about links, only images, videos, or files that are used to render the page itself.

More often than not, the image or stylesheet is being called to the donation page by your template. The templates section of your Salsa HQs (found in the Website Management tab) provides the option to "Download Template" – this one-click option will often handle the problem in one stroke.
"Download Template" takes a Salsa template that you've created, stores the images and stylesheets in Salsa's directory, and rewrites the links to those elements so that the template uses the versions stored in Salsa, rather than those stored on your site.

In addition to images and files embedded in your template, images saved in a donation page Header, Footer, or other custom text area of the page will also need to be secure. To secure such images, be sure to press the “Toggle Secure” button before clicking choosing the image in Salsa’s WYSIWYG-editor. Doing so will add the necessary “s” to the http://

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04:22 PM Dec 22, 2010 - 288 comments permalink

Five Tips for List Cleaning at the End of the Year

It’s that time of year. To give gifts, have some fun and prepare for 2011! And that means making sure your database is in order for the New Year. Here’s five handy tips to help you start 2011 off right and ready.

1. Lose some weight this holiday season by trimming the dead email weight – Over the year bad email addresses might have collected bloating your supporter list and through normal wear and tear bad email addresses will accumulate. Make sure chronic hard and soft bounces are unsubscribed from your list. And now is the time to look at your “User Unknowns” to see if they need to be kept in the system.

2. Who’s been naughty and nice? – Scoring is a great way to determine who your active donors and action takers are from the year. Consider a new communication path in the new year for those who've never taken action or donated. Different messages can make all the difference.

3. Change of (email address) – Some email addresses do change. Make sure you’re updating auto-responses you might receive in your “reply to” inbox. Also see if they have an alt email address and swap them out. There's also a system report of suspected bad email addresses -- stuff like @yaho.com, @aolcom, obvious typos like that. Run that and manually correct those addresses (provided they're a reasonably recent signup). Even better, set that report to email yourself on a regular basis and clean them up every day / week / month.

4. When online doesn’t work consider offline - Try a mailing to attempt to get their email address.

5. Segment your donors for 2011 - Use smart groups to automate this process. Large dollar donors shouldn't be receiving the same message and asks as low donors. The same goes for action takers and non-action takers.

What are some of your housekeeping tips for making sure your list is in good shape to kick off the new year?

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02:42 PM Dec 22, 2010 - 333 comments permalink

4 Things Political Campaigns Can Do in the Offseason

After months of long meetings, passionate speeches, and 15+-hour days, Election Day has come and gone, and it can be hard to think about the future. But even though many of us are still recovering from our respective political campaigns, it's important to remember that you have a list full of people that supported you during the campaign. That's real power that can be energized and utilized!

What to do now:

1. Your supporters want to hear from you. Satisfy them with regular communication. Since the campaign itself has died down, the volume can decrease, but make sure that your supporters still receive emails now and then. Tell them about local goings-on, tell them about what you're up to and how it relates to them.

2. Your supporters rallied to you for a reason. Help them continue to do so by pushing calls to action. From education to national security, from reproductive rights to clean energy, people chose to rally to you for a reason. They want to know about the recent votes in Congress, the progress (or lack thereof) happening in your community, and what you're doing about it. Whether through a petition, a "call Congress" ask, or some other engagement, keep your supporters plugged into politics--they'll appreciate you for it, you'll increase your base of support and (most importantly) you'll be playing a role in shaping policy and making our world a better place.

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12:24 PM Dec 21, 2010 - 251 comments permalink

Tips on Adding Salsa content to Facebook

If you're an online organizer, then it's pretty hard to ignore Facebook as a fantastic tool for organizing your supporters.

One of the common questions we get a lot is "How can I add Salsa pages to my organization's Facebook page?" In fact we receive that question so much that we actually answered it a year ago with a blog post from Jason and the answer (while a little technical) involves simply some copying and pasting of your HTML code into Facebook's FBML application.

While Facebook has announced that they are moving away from FBML for the customization of tabs on pages, they have not done this yet so here is a quick tutorial on how to take select Salsa pages (example: certain actions, sign up forms, etc) and embed them on your Facebook page.

While the rumors have recently swirled that Facebook will be getting rid of default landing tabs on pages all together, currently they serve as a great way to feature and direct incoming traffic to the tab of your choice.

Bottom line: The easier you make it for your supporters to participate in your actions - be it on Facebook or on Twitter or via email - the more successful your campaign will be. Though this customization of Facebook pages is not something that Salsa Labs can provide support for, we still wanted to offer some helpful tips for how to find what you're looking for to spread your organizing across platforms.

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04:32 PM Dec 20, 2010 - 248 comments permalink

Friday Fiesta: tweetchat, sharing, and happy holidays

Happy Friday!

I hope you're all keeping warm. Or, if you live somewhere warm, I hope that's pleasant for you. I've spent the past week in D.C., where it is not really warm, but I've heard it's not any warmer back home in Wisconsin. Still, I decided I will probably return home this evening… or maybe I'll just go to our Austin office, since we have one of those now.

Commons comments

It's the end of the year, so we've been talking a lot about ways to keep your fundraising fresh...

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01:19 PM Dec 17, 2010 - 197 comments permalink

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