Salsa Scoop

#Salsachat Review - December 16 2010

Yesterday we hosted our first #salsachat - a live conversation between Salsa users and staff over Twitter. The chat was a complete success with plenty of activity and great ideas shared about some best practices for various end-of-the-year organizing programs.

Some of the topics discussed included:
    •    Best email subject lines for maximizing your holiday fundraising efforts
    •    Leveraging your Facebook page as part of your end-of-year engagement program
    •    Useful end-of-year donor reports and query suggestions
    •    How to target your end of the year fundraising targets
    •    Start of year organizing tips to keep people engaged right away
    •    Scoring your list

You can read the transcript from the chat here. We're going to host more of these so look for another in January.

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12:59 PM Dec 17, 2010 - 808 comments permalink

Salsa Weekly Highlight: Push for year-end donations

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

We at Salsa have processed hundreds of millions of dollars in online donations, and we can tell you that if the year's online fundraising is a pie with six slices:

The first three fiscal quarters are one slice apiece.
The fourth slice is October and November.
The fifth slice is December through approximately Christmas.
The last slice is the last week of the year - as valuable as months and months of fundraising in spring or summer.

Those critical last days of 2010 are here, and we wanted to dedicate this week's highlight to encouraging all Salsa users to help themselves to a nice, heaping slice of that pie.

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02:24 PM Dec 16, 2010 - 282 comments permalink

Progressive Tech Firm Salsa Labs opens Downtown Austin Office

Progressive Tech Firm Salsa Labs opens Downtown Austin Office

AUSTIN, TX, December 15, 2010 - Salsa Labs, Inc. today announced the opening of its Austin, Texas office. The company, headquartered in Washington, DC, is the creator of the Salsa online organizing platform that helps thousands of organizations and campaigns engage their supporters online. Salsa Labs chose Austin for its burgeoning technology market and talented, creative workforce.

“Salsa Labs has big plans for expansion in 2011 and we think Austin is the ideal place to do it. We intend to build a team of talented techies who will take Salsa to the next level and help nonprofits, campaigns, musicians, community groups, labor unions, and individuals organize online,” said Chris Lundberg, CEO. “It’s a great opportunity to attract people who want to be a part of an entrepreneurial culture, innovate rapidly, and make a positive difference in the world.”

The office will be led by Texas native and current CFO of Salsa Labs, Taylor Keenan. “We’re looking forward to being downtown. It’s the perfect place for our unique organizational culture and there is a great opportunity to grow and connect with the tech community,” said Keenan.

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12:13 PM Dec 15, 2010 - 12 comments permalink

More thoughts from Rootscamp 2010

The single most important lesson I learned at Rootscamp 2010 is this:

Fire your gurus.

I know. I don't like typing it anymore than you might like reading it. But it's the simple truth. People who "have a gut feeling" about your messaging but who can't back that feeling with experimentally generated data are useless -- be they supporters, politicians, or board members. When they're right, they're lucky. When they're wrong, they're dangerous. In either case, odds are they're wasting your money and your time.

Let them down gently. It's not you. It's them. Ask for your CDs back and while they're off rereading a well-thumbed copy of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" (as a native Midwesterner, I can tell you, "not much"), take a gander at some tools that'll dramatically improve your email conversion rates, such as Salsa's built in A/B testing tool.

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05:49 PM Dec 13, 2010 - 4 comments permalink

Guest Blog Post: Sharing is the New Tell-A-Friend

This is a guest blog post on techniques in making your content shareable on social networks by Carie Lewis, Director of Emerging Media at the Humane Society of the United States. Carie recently did an in-house training workshop for Salsa users on this topic. Her presentation is available for download here and she can be reached via Twitter at @cariegrls. This blog post talks about some of her first experiences sharing an e-newsletter and how you can make this part of your organization's outreach program. While the Salsa sharing package allows users to easily add share functionality to their Salsa pages, the tips in this post are good for advanced users who want to get deep in the customization of sharing content. It's important to note that while sharing emails is not supported in the current Salsa sharing package, it will be included in future releases.

If you haven’t implemented sharing tools on your emails yet, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to engage existing advocates, recruit new ones, and drive substantial traffic to your website and campaigns. My first experience doing this was interesting and informative to say the least.

It was no small feat. For us, it took 2 weeks for me to figure out how to rig the code so that it worked in our content management system and pulled the right information when posting to Facebook and Twitter. But the payoff was well worth it. Preliminary results showed that just in the first day of enabling sharing features on our email, we got 500 tweets and over 15,000 visits to the web version of our email from Twitter alone.

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02:19 PM Dec 13, 2010 - 5 comments permalink

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