Salsa Scoop

What Nonprofits Need to Know About Social Media

Farra at Big Duck shares a characteristically incisive post on social media lessons for nonprofits from a recent panel discussion in the Big Apple. Head on over to find out more about her takeaways:

  • You are an adult now — it's okay to talk to strangers.
  • Take the walls down and embrace a 'social culture'.
  • The Internet is not an ATM. Success is about building relationships–not building numbers.
  • Being everywhere is nice, being relevant is best.
  • Logos don’t talk, people do.
 

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11:52 AM Oct 20, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Making Use of Directories

Directories -- located in your Salsa headquarters under the Website Management tab -- are one of the more poorly-understood features in Salsa.

Directories, quoth our documentation, "are a tool that allow you to make a portion of your Salsa supporter list searchable through a public-facing web page.  They're a unique type of page:  most Salsa forms write the user's information into the database as an input.  Directories enable your users to query and extract information out of the database."

Salsa user Rob McCausland of the Alliance for Community Media recently got wind of this hidden gem and ran with it; he's taken his own directory setup experience and contributed an extensive writeup to our user support site, Salsa Commons.

One of the things I love about Rob's directory is that it's so clearly programmatic. Everyone knows Salsa is great at list-building and e-blasting, but chances are your organization has bigger dreams than doing only that. Directories are a great way to serve information back to the public, and many of our users occupy a niche where they collect specialized data and serve it back to the community of stakeholders.

Here, Rob's directory indexes public access television, so the searchable data is really entities and institutions rather than individual people. There's no reason a directory couldn't be used for similarly abstract data: polling locations; Superfund sites; war criminal prosecutions since World War II; episodes of Mad Men ... you're limited only by your imagination.

 

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07:39 PM Oct 19, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

The Message is the Medium

Mulling (from a safe distance) the hilariously troubled rollout of GOP.com (recalling bygone tidings of its troubled conception), I couldn't help but think of Gavin Clabaugh's recent musings on social networks for organization-building.

the Question with a capital “Q”, is simple: "How can we raise money with these new social networking things?"

...

'Till now, I’ve had no ready answer for the Question. Nothing I say seems to satisfy — folks want the secret code.

Lean in a little closer. Today I'm going to tell you that answer.

Here it is: the secret decoder ring, the magic ingredient, the answer to the Question of how to raise money with online social networks. Ready?

Step One... First, you get yourself an Obama.

Wait... Don't hit that big "X" ...

I say this with all seriousness. First you get yourself an Obama. That's the secret of the Obama campaign. It was Obama — not Facebook, not Twitter, and not the bevy of would-be Dick "Bite-me" Morrises or the myriad of MoveOn's anxious to fill up your inbox, dance across your Facebook page, or displace Ashton Kutcher in the Twitterstream of useless things in 140 characters.

The real secret is this: It's never the tools, it's the content. It's never the medium, it's the message.

Or as Bush pere put it, meta-signifying through all that governance crap, "Message: I care."

Gop.com screenshot

 

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06:00 PM Oct 14, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Successful advocacy campaign has Kern County crying "spam"

The Salsa-using Center for Biological Diversity ran an action in its newsletter last week asking its members to take an online action to protect the California condor by messaging the Kern County, Calif., county supervisors in opposition to a development that would encroach condor habitat.

Evidently, it hit its mark.

Kern County Supervisors' electronic mail accounts exploded with more 1,200 form e-mails Thursday as a nationwide digital campaign launched its opposition to the Tejon Mountain Village project.

A nice bit of earned media ... followed by a familiar refrain of the put-upon public official compelled to endure public input to their public mail addresses: it's spaaaaaaaaaaam!

 

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10:42 AM Oct 05, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Catch the Salsa 101 webinar series this week

The first full week of every month is now "Salsa 101" week: five sequential webinars on five consecutive days to get any new Salsa user oriented to the system's core feature set.

Get the newest Salsa user on your team up to speed quickly by registering for any or all of these webinars in the free 101 series the week of Oct. 5:

10/5: New User Orientation
Monday, Oct. 5, 2 pm EST
Now that you're set up, learn how to get the most from a new Salsa account. Register Now!

10/6: List Management
Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2 pm EST
All about the database that underpins your system. Register Now!

10/7: Email Basics
Wednesday, Oct. 7, 3 pm EST
An introduction to creating, scheduling, sending and reporting on e-mails.  Register Now!

10/8: Signup Pages & Triggers
Thursday, Oct. 8, 4 pm EST
Get the most from signup pages with segmentation, automated follow-up, and more! Register Now!

10/9: The Big Picture
Friday, Oct. 9, 3 pm EST
Learn how to link your Salsa tools into a smooth campaign workflow and track all of its pieces. Register Now!

Not yet using Salsa?

No problem. Our weekly webinars just for prospective users will answer all your questions. Join any of these upcoming October prospective user webinars ... or contact Salsa Labs to get a personal appointment.

Thursday, Oct. 8, 2 pm EST Register Now!

Thursday, Oct. 15, 2 pm EST Register Now!

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2 pm EST Register Now!

Thursday, Oct. 29, 2 pm EST Register Now!

 

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09:56 AM Oct 04, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

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