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.

Online donations are an essential part of most Salsa users' programs, and we thought we'd revisit some of the options for tracking those donations in the toolset.

You have two basic choices: Tracking Codes and Tags. You can use either one or both together to classify your donations; the difference is:

• a single donation can have only a single tracking code; but
• a single donation can have many different tags.

Tracking Codes

Tracking Codes are probably the most straightforward way to identify your donations.

When building a donation page in your Salsa headquarters, you'll find a field under the Options tab to set a default tracking code. Just use any text that makes sense to you in this field: that text (Q4_donation_campaign in my example below) will become the tracking code for any donation made through the page.

There's also a neat trick that allows you to get link-specific tracking.

For instance, say you're linking your regular donation page through a series of Twitter messages. You'll probably want to know which donations were raised through that campaign.

Before you send out the link, just add at the end of the url &track=Twitter (or any word or code that denotes the campaign). All donations generated by that link will be tracked as Twitter and not as Q4_donation_campaign.

Tags

Salsa's ubiquitous Tags feature is also available to track donations.

When building your donation page in the Salsa headquarters, you can tag it using the "Add Tag" box in the upper right.

Use as many tags as you like! All these tags will be applied to any donations made through the tagged page.

You can also add link-specific tagging the same way you would with tracking codes. Just add a tag to the end of a link with syntax like &tag=Twitter (instead of &track=Twitter).

I hope these tips help as you set up your fundraising campaigns in the months ahead. Already made use of these features? Share your tips and experiences with the user community at Salsa Commons.org!

P.S. -- For more on all things Salsa, join us next Thursday, March 17 at our Geek Lab social in Washington DC (and stay for the karaoke).