Salsa Scoop

Fresh batch of November trainings; be sure to sign up for the newsletter

November's slate of webinars, plus a hot Nov. 19 in-person email training (with accompanying happy hour) in Washington D.C., have been posted on our Classes & Events list for your Salsa-studying needs. It's a pretty full month even without the Thanksgiving week hiatus, so take a gander and sign up for a few favorites posthaste.

Earlier today, we also sent an email alert to this same effect. If you want to be sure to have this monthly upcoming trainings notice hit your inbox, be sure to sign up for the Events & Trainings email list. (You may also want to get on either or both of the other lists as well: the Weekly Update, a quick hit on a new development of interest to Salsa campaign managers [example]; and, the popular Friday Fiesta, an informal little roundup of news around the Salsa-verse [example]).

Happy Halloween!

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03:05 PM Oct 30, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

How Oceana makes its storefronts unsinkable

Thanks to Jonathan Frank for the guest post on how his shop, Oceana, configures storefronts like its adoption center to get the most from its Salsa storefronts. Look for a few of these tips to appear in the next Holiday Fundraising webinar on Nov. 9.

When using the storefront for a premium-driven fundraising campaign, there are a few important things to be aware of.

1) Shipping information. Be sure to exploit the functionality allowing users to input separate billing and shipping (it's an automatic default on the storefront page). Using conditional triggers will also help deliver the appropriate receipt (i.e., Trigger A if ship to and bill to addresses are the same; Trigger B if not). Here's how to set that up:

Under the "Options" tab of Trigger A, for use when there's no separate shipping address, enter this (including the quotes) in the Send Conditions field: "[[name]]"==""
Under the "Options" tab of Trigger B, for use when the buyer has provided a different shipping address, enter "[[name]]"!=""
Then, select both triggers (along with any internal alert triggers) in the storefront setup

2) Custom fields. Be cognizant of the custom fields you use to collect certain information. For instance, we have a "Name on Adoption Certificate" field that is merely a VARCHAR custom field. If someone makes multiple adoptions and wants a different name on each adoption, the field will be overwritten with whatever name was entered last. Merging custom fields on internal notification triggers can help insure that the information is preserved in the right hands.

3) Reporting. You're going to have to fulfill your premiums, so be sure to set up a clear, convenient report that meshes with your fulfillment vendor or that you can easily understand if you're doing your own fulfillment.

4) Stay organized. When premiums are involved, especially for holidays, donors will want to know when they're getting their premium. I suggest setting up an internal trigger for each sale and putting the order number in the subject line. (Oceana does this with a merge field, so the subject as configured in the Salsa trigger reads: Order #[[donation_KEY]] Details; merge fields in the message body record the buyer's information.) You can just push those triggers to a folder in Outlook, so if someone calls in about an order, you already have all their information conveniently stored in Outlook and arranged by order number (just don't forget to include the same [[donation_KEY]] order number on the donor's receipt).

5) For high-end customization... The best tip to thoroughly re-style the page is also to get someone involved who is fluent (or fairly knowledgable) in HTML, Javascript and CSS. There's a lot of flexibility possible.

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04:04 PM Oct 29, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Salsa Weekly Highlight: Email delivery audit

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

All of us on the Salsa team are working to build new tools and improve old ones. There is so much going on!

As you know, we don't put out quarterly software releases. System enhancements are happening all the time and we want you to know about them as they're happening. To improve our communications around this, we decided to send out a weekly update highlighting the most exciting Salsa change (e.g., a new feature, an important upgrade or fix) of the week. Welcome to the 'Weekly Salsa Highlight'!

Why only a highlight?

Because if you're like me, you already have too many emails in your inbox. I want to keep this weekly email short and sweet. I'll highlight the coolest thing we're doing each week and if you want to read more you can check out Salsa Commons for additional news and updates. So, without further delay, this week's highlight:

Email Deliverability

We're constantly working to help more of your email hit recipients' inboxes, and we've recently made a few upgrades to help Salsa emails perform even better.

We've moved mail servers to a new, state-of-the-art data center
We've more than doubled our pool of email IP addresses to balance and optimize delivery
We've contracted an outside expert to conduct an email deliverability audit and recommend further improvements

So, email with confidence! We'll be sure to keep you updated as the audit progresses.

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12:00 AM Oct 28, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood win hits NYT

A big victory for longtime Salsa users Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood made the New York Times on Friday:

the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those "Baby Einstein" videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

"We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds," said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

If you're not wise to the scam, what you do is take a dubious connection between music and early childhood intelligence, overstate its conclusion beyond any bounds of plausibility, and sponge up a few hundred million dollars. (Ironically, the real baby Einstein was a late bloomer.)

CCFC, as noted, has been on this for ages, like this (now-outdated) action. You can find what they're working on today in CCFC's action center.

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03:42 PM Oct 27, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Your Mother Wants You To Go Home to Eat

The Great Firewall of China -- that country's massive Internet censorship program -- is the great standing exception to the the cornucopian communication age cottage industry, not unlike China itself is for neoliberalism's great markets=freedom project.

So it's fascinating to take in this academic meditation on the uncanny spread of an Internet meme, The Curious Case of Jia Junpeng, or The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace.

the main message is that in China today, the internet can always be appropriated by users for their own purposes, however closely it is monitored or controlled. ... ... The issue is not simply a matter of citizen expression versus state control, or freedom versus repression, though these are of central importance. Even during more controlled periods such as the Cultural Revolution, there were what Tang Tsou calls "zones of indifference" which state power did not try to penetrate or control. In some ways, cyberspace is easier to control. A vast online community, for example, may be monitored from a small central control office. Entire networks can be shut down. Yet this does not mean Chinese cyberspace does not have its own "zones of indifference."

"Zones of indifference" ... reminiscent of (if distinctly less exalted than) Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones. What's next in this for the timeless play of coercion, critique and consent? I think I may have to pick up the gentleman's book to get a few ideas.

(Via)

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10:45 PM Oct 22, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

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