Salsa Scoop

Salsa Weekly Highlight: New Email Tool

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

It's the 'Weekly Salsa Highlight', your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, check out Salsa Commons for news, updates, and conversation every day.

With year-end fundraising appeals queuing up over the next two weeks, this is one you won't want to miss ...

Email

Salsa's upgraded Email package has been available and out of beta some time now and will soon become the only Email tool in the system.

If you've been using Salsa since early 2009 or before and haven't upgraded, you'll want to install the new Email package now. (Note: you must be a Super Admin to install packages. Ask your organization's Super Admin to make this change if you can't see the "account" tab on the right side of Salsa.)

Click on "Accounts" in the upper right hand corner of your dashboard
Then, click "Manage Your Packages" in the bottom right-hand box
"Click here to add the new Email Blast Package"

That's it! Once you've installed it, you can begin e-mailing with it immediately, and you'll find all the same great options, plus some brand new functionality, like:

Expanded query interface for better targeting.
More flexible templating.
Better targeting through the new query builder.
Powerful dynamic content builder.
Mail validation and spam checks to help you catch potential usability problems before you hit "send".

Even the user interface is only a slight change from what you're used to. Documentation for the new e-mail package is already available, so there's nothing to fear: make the switch today and ensure your holiday appeals look and perform their best!

(If you really, really can't bear to part with the familiar old Email tool, you can continue using it through New Year's. However, all Salsa accounts will automatically be upgraded with the Email package shortly after Jan. 1, 2010.)

Questions? Contact support@wiredforchange.com or support@democracyinaction.org.

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12:00 AM Dec 16, 2009 - 29 comments permalink

Dec. 17: Head into the holidays on a Salsa high

On this, the last full* week of the decade, the DemocracyInAction, Wired For Chance, and Salsa Labs teams invite you to celebrate the season with us this Thursday, Dec. 17

We've got two special events that day to ring out Old Man 2009 and bring in the bouncing baby 2010:

Support Open House

Got a thorny support problem? Need a hand with a special customization? Feel like you would benefit from in-person assistance?

Put the entire Salsa team (developers too!) to work for you absolutely free at our support open house this Thursday, Dec. 17 ... where you decide the agenda.

From 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. we'll have all Salsa staff, on hand together at our headquarters at 1700 Connecticut Ave. NW to answer your questions. Just RSVP here!

Salsa Holiday Fiesta

From 6:30 until late, we'll be partying the night away with live Salsa music and a couple hundred folks from the Salsa family at one of U Street's hottest night spots. You won't want to miss it!

Tabaq Bistro
1336 U St. NW
Washington DC 20009
(Map)

Space in the red room is limited, so please RSVP if you plan to come. There are two easy ways to do so:

Come on by to either or both if you're in the 202 this week. And wherever you may lay your head, we with the Salsa team wish you all the joy of the season.

* "Full" loosely defined as "where a plurality of your coworkers are dependably on hand."

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05:01 PM Dec 15, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Salsa Weekly Highlight: New Supporter Management tool

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

The latest and greatest this week is a major upgrade to our supporter management tool, which is chock-full of Salsa user's most highly sought-after feature enhancements. It's ready for your installation right this minute.

New Supporter Management Features:

This is such a big update, there are too many individual improvements to spell them all out here, but see if a few of these don't whet your appetite:

Customizable overview fields: Put all the information you need most in the at-a-glance panel of a supporter's record. (And add pictures, too.)
Contacts: Granular contact tracking including codes, purposes, and priorities, with advance scheduling and the ability to assign "to-do" items to coworkers.
Home and secondary addresses: Simplified interfaces to manage billing, shipping, secondary, and other addresses. (Plus Google Maps for all addresses  .)
Householding : Assign supporters to other households , name households, and suppress non-heads of households in queries and reports.
Inline Donations : Easy hand entry of gifts, with over a dozen donation and tracking fields, plus real-time credit card processing and on-the-fly email acknowledgment.

Did that sound like something your Salsa account ought to have? Add the new Supporter Management today!

Questions about how to use the new package? Check out the accompanying documentation to learn more.

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12:00 AM Dec 10, 2009 - 1 comments permalink

Winter Spice: The Salsa Holiday Fiesta

Clients, consultants, and friends of all description who hang their hats in the Washington, D.C., area (or happen to be passing through next week) should join us next Thursday evening for our holiday party at U Street's Tabaq.

The Salsa Holiday Fiesta ... you don't want to miss this. It'll be wall to wall with the smartest progressive activists, technologists, and giant floating brains to be found in the mid-Atlantic, plus tapas, drinks, and a live Salsa band.

Two RSVP choices:

See you at Tabaq on the 17th!

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10:44 AM Dec 08, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Adding a Salsa signup box to Facebook

The Salsa Labs Facebook page -- you are a fan already, yes? -- just incorporated an email signup form, and you might be interested in knowing the trick for your own page.

Though the example here incorporates a regular signup page into Facebook, the same technique could be used to embed event registrations, petition signatures, or other forms of action (but passing donations is a different matter, and this kind of form won't dialogue with the Salsa data warehouse for a congressional district lookup without much more intensive spadework than I've described here).

1. Get the Static FBML app

This extremely handy application lets you build a box or a tab with straight HTML (or, with Facebook's own Facebook Markup Language syntax). No programming skills needed.

Just search it up, and add it to your organization's page.

Add Static FBML to my page's favorites graphic

2. Get the form code of a Salsa signup page

Now that you're able to add some HTML to your Facebook page, all you have to do is get your mitts on some usable HTML.

No problem.

There are a couple of ways to do this, depending on your coding skills. While developers can dig as deep as they dare, the best choices for duffers like myself are:

Build a signup page (or other type of page) in Salsa. (In this case, I just used one of our standard signup pages.) View the end-user page, hit "View Source" to see its HTML, and copy the
```
form
```
and
```
/form
```
tags and everything between them.
Alternatively, hit the "Developer Resources" link at the bottom of any page in your Salsa headquarters to find some generic ready-for-copy-and-paste code for an external signup form, as shown below. Then, copy and paste that code.

3. Create an email signup form in Facebook

Now that we've got the code on the clipboard, back to Facebook.

Open up your organization's Facebook page -- we're assuming here that you have admin privileges -- and click "Edit Page". In the screen that follows, find FBML, as shown:

Then, just click the "Edit" button (highlighted) to go to work.

Title your box whatever you'd like (unimaginately, I went with "Email Signup"), then paste all that signup form text into the "FBML" box.

4. Add the form to your Facebook page

Now, it's just a matter of adding the tab to your Facebook page, which you can do the same way you customize that page with any other new tab.

You'll also find your new Static FBML creation under the "Boxes" tab, where you can select it and optionally send it to the sidebar of your wall, as I've done. That makes the form visible to anyone who lands on your page.

5. Tweaks and Troubleshooting

You should be ready to go! Test the form out and see how it works, then fine-tune accordingly. People who use it should land (immediately) in your Salsa headquarters; the form will have no effect on their Facebook profile, your Facebook page, or anything else within Facebook itself.

Here are a few things you might want to take notice of:

Make sure the form action is right. Depending on where you copy the code, you might have a relative url, which won't work in Facebook. You'll want a full url, and you can find the right one for your organization by checking the Developer Resources section discussed above. Put it right at the start of the form.
```
form action="http://YOUR NODE ADDRESS/dia/api/process.jsp" method="post"
    
```
Especially if you're going to place it on your wall, make sure it's reasonably succinct. Space is at a premium.
If you're fussy about your graphic design, you can crib Facebook's styling colors here, which I did on mine to make the "Join these email list(s)" header look Zuckerberg-blue.
Consider your redirect path (I used none, so that list joiners just stay on the Facebook page; you might have other ideas) and acknowledgment triggers.
If you want to be rigorous about tracking, you might also consider passing a Source_Details value, tag values, group affiliations, or other elements. You should be able to crib code for this sort of thing by building it in a normal signup page in Salsa; ask at Salsa Commons if you're stuck.

(Note: this is not the Facebook Connect integration recently mentioned in these pages. But that integration is still coming!)

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03:15 PM Dec 03, 2009 - 3 comments permalink

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