Salsa Scoop

Download Holiday Fundraising Webinar

Remember last year when the holiday fundraising season suddenly appeared! Perhaps the phrase "if I only had time" was muttered? October is a great month to start your online holiday fundraising plan. You'll need time to 1) use the month of November to remind your supporters how great you are, 2) integrate your online and offline fundraising and 3) map out your online communication plan, to name a few.

HOLIDAY FUNDRAISING WEBINAR - Listen and watch this (unedited) webinar I gave about online holiday fundraising

This 1 hour workshop covered the following:

- What should my online donation page include?
- What are they key elements in an online holiday fundraising email appeal? When to send?
- Ideas of how to use November as the "month of thanks"
- How to integrate your online approach with offline fundraising

 

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08:05 PM Oct 23, 2008 - 2 comments permalink

The best, most affordable tool ... don't take our word for it

Flattering call-out from Billy "Upski" Wimsatt, League of Young Voters founder who probably doesn't even remember working down the hall from me on U Street.

 

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12:22 PM Oct 20, 2008 - 2 comments permalink

I'm not (as) confused anymore.

Everything I learned about the internet, I learned from Salsa.  Well, okay, Salsa by way of "Tomato," our old, not-quite-as-pretty interface of joy and wonder.

 

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05:04 PM Oct 16, 2008 - 6 comments permalink

After School Programs, Social Networking and CRM

On Friday I helped train 30 of the most important people in New York in online activism and social networking. I refer of course, to the women and men who work with young people after school lets out. These ‘Out of School Time Providers’ work with the kids from the neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates. If they can engage, motivate and enrich lives, then those kids have a better chance of getting to college, finishing high school, or at the very least, staying off the streets.

We went over the usual suspects: CRM, web 2.0, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Then we opened it up to questions and ideas for online projects that could be used as part of after school programs. This list might be interesting to others:

Questions:

  • How do we implement programs that use the internet in the face of restrictions, safety concerns and bureaucratic hurdles?
  • How can we measure the benefits in ways that make sense to senior management and funders?
  • How can we work with a mix of kids, those with lots of access to the internet, alongside those with limited access?
  • What’s a good place to start?
  • How – and should we – get students to use language in adult ways, as opposed to slang, acronyms, etc.
  • What tools exist for moderation, privacy, and security that can be used easily?

Ideas from the brainstorm:

  • Add an online component to regular homework for extra credit. Small things, like posting a book review you read as a Facebook note.
  • Find a school in another country to establish a cybe-rpenpal program.
  • For any group that has shows (theater, music, dance) incorporate online marketing or event RSVP’s.
  • Use Cafepress and other sites to offer products for sale. Look at examples of business ideas that work – maybe some implemented by other young people.
  • Upload videos from school around a particular theme. For example: have a praise day, where students offer a compliment or praise to someone else in the community – a teacher or fellow student.
  • Explore questions that have no easy answers: how are public schools funded? What is the typical student loan debt?
  • Collect email addresses of graduating seniors, so that incoming seniors can ask them questions about their lives and experiences.
  • Use polling/voting/deliberation technologies to figure out what youth want to accomplish as a group, and leverage those interests to make programs more successful.
  • Use online advocacy to work on social issues of concern to the students.

CRM technology is becoming cheaper, easier to use and more pervasive in all kinds of environments, including education. My motive in presenting at this program was to make contacts with the nonprofits who run after school activities, in case they need to – ahem -- engage in online fundraising and advocacy. That might take a while. Still, the folks and the room taught me more about the space they work in, and I taught them about the nonprofit-tech space. What a wonderful use of my DIA approved volunteering time.

This program was offered by the Partnership for After School Education.

Building Stronger Programs Through Collaboration
2nd Annual Conference for Out-of-School Time Providers
NYC Department of Youth & Community Development
October 9, 2008

 

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10:17 PM Oct 10, 2008 - 6 comments permalink

Congressional servers buckling under bailout bill messages

The weight of public response to the bailout measure that's had all Congress atwitter this fortnight overwhelmed House servers earlier this week, slowing or preventing some messages to Representatives.

As of this writing, with debate underway on the floor (liveblog at the Grey Lady; video stream at C-SPAN), the writerep system appears to be functioning normally for this writer but still displays this warning:

Due to an unusually high amount of emails currently being submitted through the Write Your Representative feature (above), you may experience a slow response or error message when attempting to send emails through this system during hours of peak demand. We apologize for this inconvenience. Our technicians are working to fix the problem. Thank you.



So what's an activist organization to do?

The ubiquitous Colin Delany of epolitics.com has a handy cheat sheet of other actions you might consider mobilizing -- good brain food even during those humdrum times when economic apocalypse is not upon us and the Hill is handling its e-mail with only the usual degree of malfeasance.

Let me venture an option 1(a) further to Colin's first suggestion to "spam" (sir, I protest) "other people":  everyone in town is eager to get back out on the stump.  That makes opponents in congressional races a prime potential messaging target -- probably mostly for groups with a significant local presence that can pick the precise targeting method and finesse the messaging.

Candidates attempting to unseat incumbents look to your humble narrator like a largely untapped e-activism vein.

And unlike incumbents, at least some of these might want these messages -- at least if it gives them an opportunity to demonstrate transparency and responsiveness.  I daresay an outside actor like the British WriteToThem.com (nee FaxYourMP) could find aspirants interested in plugging into the same conversations a ready source of content and eyeballs -- and simultaneously move existing members away from the writerep chokehold the next time the Invisible Hand goes panhandling.

 

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11:30 AM Oct 03, 2008 - 1 comments permalink

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