Salsa Scoop

Score a Freebie to NTEN's Online Nonprofit Technology Conference

The Nonprofit Technology Network's Online Nonprofit Tech Conference -- two solid days of interactive online nptech training less the pleasantries of the Transportation Security Administration -- is coming up this month September 16-17.

At $250 for members / $350 for non-members, it's not exactly pocket change, even if it is well-priced relative to comparable live events and for this version you'll save on hotel rooms and per-diems.

If you're interested but could use a break on the fee, you're in luck: just join the conversation by posting [substantively!] on this blog comment thread to score a 25% discount on registration. (Make sure to link to your own site so they can find you to deliver the pellet.) Even better: two commenters will be selected to win completely free registration.

Not so interested in the ONTC? The 16th and 17th, and many other dates this month as well, are laden with Salsa webinars ... all pre-discounted 100%.

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01:10 PM Sep 02, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Paying Tribute to a Progressive Champion

All of us here at DemocracyInAction were deeply saddened by the news last night that America lost a great champion of the progressive movement - Senator Edward Kennedy. Throughout the country, tributes are pouring in as Americans share their appreciation for someone who gave so much to make life better for so many.

Senator Kennedy has been there for the hundreds of progressive organizations that use Salsa, and we'd like to make it easy to share our appreciation for his work. The Kennedy family has set up a tribute site at www.tedkennedy.org with a form for people to share their memories and express their sympathies with his family. If DemocracyInAction member organizations would like to set up a campaign through our Actions 2.0 tool to help your supporters send messages through this form, you can easily do that. Simply create a custom recipient for "Senate Kennedy Tribute Messages" and contact support at democracyinaction dot org requesting that we link the form to that custom recipient. Our standard $95 fee for this service is being waived for this form (as long as it stays the same, which we expect it to).

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05:00 PM Aug 26, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Salsa Labs @ Netroots Nation '09

Last week, Salsa Labs made the trek to Pittsburgh and the LEED-certified David Lawrence Convention Center for Netroots Nation '09. The conference was big success, and it gave us a chance to meet many of the people who are making grassroots organizing happen in the progressive movement. The event was my first conference with Salsa Labs, and I enjoyed the chance to finally meet face-to-face many of the developers and web gurus who are working on packages and extensions for the Salsa platform. We are very excited about the forthcoming launch of the Salsa Marketplace this fall.

The Marketplace is part of a multi-pronged effort by Salsa Labs to make the Salsa platform more accessible and appealing to third party developers and partners. Our development team is currently working on a re-write of our existing API and SalsaScript documentation, along with some new tutorials. In addition, our new sandbox deployment schedule will help ensure that developers both at SalsaLabs and our partners are working on code that matches exactly what our clients are using.

If you're a developer and you're reading this post, I (Geoff) would love to find out more from you about what things you need to develop on our platform. Please send me an email, it really makes my day.

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03:16 PM Aug 10, 2009 - 4 comments permalink

Frequently Asked Questions About Reports

(Promoted from the documentation: some highlights of popular questions about Salsa reports, many from our recent trainings, answered by Chelsea the support Jedi.)

Q: How do I find all donations (regardless of amount) for those donors who have given $500 or more at least once.

A: For this type of report, you'll want to select at least the Donation table, and also the Supporter table if you need information such as the Supporter's address. From there, I'd recommend selecting the supporter key and amount field (at least) from the column options, with conditions for Result = 0 and amount greater than 500. You can group by the supporter key value and add a group concat function on the amount field to return a list of all transactions greater than $500.

Q: What's the quickest and easiest way to see donation results from a specific email blast?

A: We use the email blast keys as tags to indicate conversion rates. If you create an aggregate report on Donations, you can select the columns that you need and then use the Filter by Tag option to filter your results to only those donation records that are tagged with a tag equal to the email blast key.

Q: Can you show us the format for the "start at this time" field?

A: When scheduling a blast to send to yourself (or using any date field in Salsa), you'll want to format the date like 2009-06-13 14:00.

Q: Can you run a report on supporter data like date created, but restrict it to only members of one group?

A: You can indeed. Under the first step of the report builder, you can use the Advanced Object Chooser to select these tables: Groups, Supporter Groups, Supporter and Supporter Custom if you need this as well. To remind you of the column selection then, you can select the Date Created field from the Supporter record and add a function of Month and check the Group by box, then add a count of the Supporter table's supporter key field, making sure to change the Label of the field so that it doesn't show up as a hyperlink but as a number.

(Note: Or, turn the group into a tag and simply filter by tag. -ed.)

Q: What is roll-up?

A: From our documentation: "When checked, a report with rollup will also display a sum total of aggregated sums as the last line of the report - for instance, in a count of people signing a petition month by month, the last line of a "rollup" report will show the total number of all people who have taken that action."

My coworker Jason also really likes to use this for donation reports. There's a bit more about it here.

Q: Is there printed documentation on this?

A: The reports documentation home page is at: http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/commons/package/?packageId=salsa.report.common Through the Full Documentation, there's a link to a summary of commonly-used tables which will hopefully help with getting started on selecting your own tables: http://salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/web/wiki/public/?reference=Brief%20table%20summary

Q: if you upload a database (.txt) file can you run a report just on that database?

A: If you would like to view only supporters created from a particular file import, you can set the conditions for Supporter Source Details equal to the file name of the import. Optionally, you can also group or tag the records sat the time of import for easier retrieval.

Q: Please send an email to describe how to set the RESULT field on donation reports.

A: "RESULT = 0" indicates valid online transactions. If you also have manually-entered transactions that you would like to see in your report results, I'd recommend using "RESULT is in list 0,-1" and adding a condition for "Transaction Type not like %Test%".

Q: Can you set the transaction date function to do "previous 30 days" so that it will consider the current date when running the report so you don't have to edit the report each time?

A: There are a couple options that are similar to this, including "In this month," "In the last week," "In the last 24 hours," "In the past," and "In the future" - These can be selected from the Function menu under the Operations or Function column on the Conditions tab. The report can also be set to accept any arbitrary user date or date range each time it is run.

Q: What's the difference between the conditions tab and the filter tab?

A: Anne gets credit for this succinct note: Conditions let you ask the database for info and then filters tell the report to show you a specified subset of the data that meet the conditions. This, I thought was quite well put, but again, please ask if you need clarification.

Q: Can you talk about when and why the word "KEY" should be removed from some the fields before you actually run the report?

A: If you leave the default label as (for example) supporter.supporter_KEY, the end results will display as a link to the individual supporter record from the report window.

If you don't want the results to appear as a link, especially in a case where, for example, you'd want to display the actual count of supporter keys instead of a link to a single key, you'll want to rename the field with your own label.

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09:41 AM Jul 31, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

Microsoft Code Breaks Microsoft Browser

I carry no brief in the eternal OS flamewar. Actually, I happen to be one of the few Windows users in a predominantly Mac shop. It's just a tool, and for whatever combination of reasons, tastes and experiences, it happens to be the one that works for me.

I front this fact because I'm about to tell an old, old story. Dante wrote this story. Homer sang this story. The Song of Solomon -- so some scholars will tell you -- is really about this story.

The story: Microsoft fail.

Now, we often urge, even implore, user organizations not to set up their web content in Microsoft Word. I think we're sometimes suspected of upholding some arcane creed of geek purity. Not a bit of it: the reason is that Microsoft is blissfully indifferent to web standards other than its arbitrary own. It would be a profligate waste of programming resources to retrofit everything, especially when there are so many ways to compose good (even merely mediocre) HTML.

Well, once upon a time -- that is, this afternoon -- in a land far, far away -- that is, in the support ticket queue -- a brave progressive organization was trying to turn visitors out to its event.

But the visitors had a problem.

Over forest and glen them came; through fire and floods they came; they braved the elements; they bested their foes; and when they arrived, arrayed in glory, the web registration page was totally broken.

It turns out, it had been built with Microsoft stuff: copies of copies, handed down from ancient e-mail blasts, said the Old Ones. Though it looked like a fine web site on the outside, it concealed a deep and terrible secret within: strange and terrible tags, like w:PunctuationKerning, and o:smarttagtype, dreadful to behold. It was the Dorian Gray of registration forms.

These dark arts (wond'rous to tell) were powerless against most web browsers. Those who rode Firefox and Chrome found the city (er, the page) bountiful, and glorious, and thither did they click.

But one web browser could not pass:

Internet Explorer.

And so it was that Microsoft's browser was blasted with confusion by Microsoft's own code, in fulfillment of the Book of Irony.

See this timeless myth updated (like those modern Shakespeare takes) coming soon to a big (or at least, laptop-sized) screen near you soon:

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09:05 PM Jul 29, 2009 - 0 comments permalink

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