Salsa Scoop> tag: ”nptech“

Salsa Highlight: Personalized Donation Histories

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's what in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week's feature is an oldie but a goodie, and one that many users aren't yet taking advantage of.

Personalize Emails with Dynamic Content

While a generic email message is fine to use for your online communications, email blasts that have personalized content directly relevant for the recipient often have more impact, result in more taken actions, and generate more page views.

The Salsa Email tool allows you to add several varieties of Dynamic Content from a picklist you'll find right under the HTML Content tab ...

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Charter Center Wants to Optimize Multi-Audience Communication from Start to Finish

by Alex Cone

The New York City Charter School Center is an independent nonprofit committed to expanding access to high-quality public schools for all students regardless of where they live and the challenges they face. We believe that charter schools are partners in a larger effort to build and maintain a great system of public schools.

So what do we do? We help new charter schools get started, support existing schools, and engage the charter school community around key issues. It’s easy to see that we serve a lot of separate and at times overlapping constituencies. On any given day we may be promoting technical events for existing charter schools, engaging with start-up schools, and organizing parents to speak out about funding inequities.

This is where Salsa comes in.

We need a tool that allows us to seamlessly collect email addresses, create lists, send emails, organize events, and host petitions. Salsa must have known we were coming. The suite of tools is just what we need.

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May 4 Salsa Marketplace Webinar: Activate Supporters with Groundcrew

by Jason Z.

We're closing in on the official launch of the Salsa Marketplace, a bustling souk of apps that connect to and extend Salsa in various different ways. In fact, we've already told you in this space about Flimp email videos.

This afternoon (Tuesday, May 4), you have the opportunity to learn about a new Salsa-integrated application that coordinates your people in real-time to accomplish things in the real world: Groundcrew.

This Marketplace mobile-organizing app lets your organization handle Salsa-managed supporters with text messaging, iPhone, Twitter, and location tracking. And you can get all your questions about it answered at the webinar today Tuesday, May 4, from 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern.

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Salsa-powered Change.org petitions now available as widgets

by Jason Z.

A few months ago, we were pleased to announce the Change.org petition tool powered by the Salsa toolset.

Last week, Change.org took it up a proverbial notch by making those petitions widget-ready at the click of a button.

Just bang one out and embed it as easily as ... well, as easily as this explanatory video.

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The Email Gnome: Shrink Your Images

by The Email Gnome

Welcome everyone, to the first installment of The Email Gnome. I’ll be giving you tips and tricks to make your email blasts faster, better, and more reliable.
 
Being a gnome, I’m a fan of all things small, and email blasts are no exception.

Small is beautiful.

The larger an email blast is, the longer it takes to send, and the longer it takes for your recipients to download. Large emails also increase the suspicion of spam blockers and filters, and increase complaint rates because of downloads timing out.

The optimum size for an email blast is under about 25 Kilobytes (KB), and the maximum size of an email blast is about 250 KB. As an example, a recent Friday Fiesta email was about 8 KB.

In terms of size restrictions, don't worry much about text: type away until your heart’s content, and you won't have to worry about your e-blast being too big. (I'd keep it brief, as your supporters are unlikely to want to read a novel in their inbox. But if they did want to, you could send an entire text version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and it would top out at only 177 KB!)

Where you really get into trouble is with pictures and images, especially the high-resolution ones that you or someone else took with a fancy digital camera. While these look awesome on your computer screen, they can slow email to a crawl.
 
Which brings us to today’s topic: image resizing.

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Party for Change

by Lindsay Marsh, Middle Coast LLC

Middle Coast LLC, the hottest new consulting firm in the Progressive Movement, is pleased to join every online organizer's best friend, Salsa Labs, in co-sponsoring Welcome to Roots Camp - A Night of Mayhem.

In teaming up with the good folks at the New Organizing Institute, Middle Coast and Salsa wish to honor the front line activists who make progressive change possible with whiskey, beer and delicious snacks.

Get ready to rev up your Rock Band on and carry on like the Karaoke star you know you are, and join us at Salsa’s headquarters located at the corner of Connecticut and R NW, just north of the Dupont Circle metro station. The entrance is on R st, between the Starbucks and the Teaism.

Empowering people is hard work. Middle Coast and Salsa are proud to lend a hand to the New Organizing Institute as they host "a candid reflection on all of the online and offline organizing done in 2009." Roots Camp DC begins Saturday, Feb. 20, but the party starts Friday night at 8:00 pm.

So join Middle Coast, Salsa, and NOI - a triumvirate of organizing excellence and good cheer - and kick off Roots Camp as it sprouts in the District in 2010.

Middle Coast LLC is a team of skilled professionals and passionate advocates with decades of experience in the progressive advocacy and campaign world. Melissa Byrne, Gina Cooper, Lindsay Marsh and Melissa McNee founded Middle Coast in 2009 to help progressive causes and candidates find success one strategic decision at a time.

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It's Dec. 31: Do You Know Where Your Fundraising Ask Is?

by Jason Z.

It's just hours to the end of a year that most will be pleased to put in the rear-view mirror.

If you're like me, your inbox has been filling up this week with nonprofit fundraising asks: the secret of asking during the last week of the year is clearly out. And that prompts an obvious question.

How indeed to be heard in the din?

There must be more tactics in heaven and earth for design and message and creativity than are dreamt of in my philosophy, but I can tell you timing: ask today. I've received dozens of fundraising appeals this week from various sources but so far only a handful on New Year's Eve.

That's an opportunity being missed, at least for any 501(c)3 or other organization whose gifts have tax implications for the donors. In fact, you might want to ask twice today.

Dec. 31 is nonprofit fundraising day. Over 15% of the online gifts that DemocracyInAction recorded for its nonprofit members in all of December 2008 came in the last 24 hours of the year:

Oh, and the average per gift late in the last few days of the year is higher, too.

Don't have an e-appeal queued up today? Do yourself a favor and set up [at least] one before midnight.

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Gavin Clabaugh on Nonprofit Technology

by Jason Z.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation's Gavin Clabaugh -- our favorite funder who's never funded us -- talks nonprofit tech.  Via the Gilbert Center.

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Ryan Ozimek on the Nonprofit Jungle Podcast

by Jason Z.

Ryan Ozimek of PICnet, which will build you a fly site with the Joomla content management system, talks open source with New York consultants Big Duck.

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Not too late to make a holiday ask

by Jason Z.

By this point, it's becoming more general knowledge that the last week of the year is a real sweet spot for holiday fundraising.  But just to underscore the point -- be sure to get out at least one fundraising appeal today or tomorrow, terrible economy be damned.  In fact, it's not only not too late to make a holiday ask, these next two days are probably the absolute best time all year to make that ask.  Given the bleak fundraising scene that likely awaits come January and February and beyond, it'd be crazy not to put out that pitch e-mail in some form in the next 24 hours or so.  Heck, how about one today and two tomorrow?  Come February, are you more likely to wish that you'd asked more often or less often back when the getting was good?

Actually, for anyone with an online component in the job description, this holiday season could be the leading edge of an important structural shift in nonprofit fundraising.

While all charitable giving of every description figures to suffer in the years ahead, some scattered data points from retail suggest that online purchases more or less held their own during this past (and otherwise disastrous) holiday season.  Some of that undoubtedly reflects purchases that would otherwise have been made at brick-and-mortar locations being shifted online, and while not all the parameters of nonprofit development are the same, it's a trend one could easily imagine spilling over.  As with selling sneakers, nonprofit giving opportunities online cut out many expenses (notably mailing) and present a lower threshold for gift completion.

If a pullback in the overall revenue picture of many organizations is in the works, it's a pretty good time to remind H.R. managers how valuable the online piece is to the organization.

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