The email blaster is by far our most-used tool. Since its inception it has, like many of the DIA tools, evolved organically. There are six separate steps to send an email blast and most of the steps seem to be just thrown in random order.

Master Blaster

In the Salsa edition of the blaster we decided to follow a more logical approach and one that is more akin to composing and sending an email from your desktop email application. The number of steps has been reduced from six to three: Write, Target, Send. In the first step, writing your email, we've combined the ability to choose a template, set the from fields and then compose the email. The new template chooser allows you to see a preview of your template than just having to rely on a name. (Also you'll notice that we replaced our HTML editor of choice with a new one, FCKeditor. The previous one, TinyMCE, served us well but also caused many headaches. The new editor will not rewrite your code, as TinyMCE was wont to do, and has some great additions such as a really nice image management package. User testing has shown that folks really seem to like it.) The next step is the query interface which I've previously written about. The last step allows you to schedule the blast (notice the new graphical calendar picker?), preview and send the blast. During user testing we made lots of refinements to this process. One feature that we initially glossed over, and at this late date are still incorporating, is the ability to send using previous blasts. Not sure how we missed this initially but this is one of the benefits of testing before release.

Tag. Everything is it.

Tags are one of the hip, new, Web2.0 buzzwords. Always looking to keep up with the Joneses, we decided we needed tags too. But the DIA tags are not your typical type of tags. We needed a way to relate objects in the system with anything else in the system. The problem our users were trying to solve was how to get stats on mulitple items in campaign. For example, let's pretend you are an environmental NGO and you are working on a campaign to save the whales. Part of this campaign will consist of the following:

• weekly email updates for four weeks
• a house party
• two online actions
• targeted signup pages
• a "save the whales"-themed donation page

On a simple level, you can search on tags to instantly pull up all these pages and anything else that might be related. The challenge now is to generate a report across the spectrum of the entire campaign. Instead of trying to munge together stats from each part of the campaign separately, tags allow you to tag, or keyword, each part with the same word. In this case you might use the tag "whales". Now you can run a report on the tag "whales". This will bring back a more comprehensive report including:

• the conversion rate on the emails
• the total supporters that are now tagged with “whales”. (Any supporter that took part in some part of these online activities is now tagged.)
• How many people came to the house parties
• The total amount of money raised

Now you have a much better, more accurate, and quicker way to establish the success level of the entire campaign. Enjoy a shaky video of CTO Chris Lundberg demoing and describing:

Do you know the score?

Now take tags and combine them with scoring. Scoring allows you, yes you, to set your own score for each activity any of your supporters partake in. For example, you may assign one point for subscribing to your email list, two points for attending an event, and three points for every dollar someone donates. This allows you to "score" your supporters. Now you can see who your "super-supporters" are by quickly glancing at their score. As a bonus, the scores decay over time, pushing the most current activists/donors/volunteers to the top of the list. Now you have a goldmine of data on your supporters. Find out how how your whales campaign did by seeing how it changed your supporters' scores over time, for instance: if your overall supporter list score increased during the same time your ran your whales campaign, I think you'd be safe to say that you had a success. Here, again, is Chris:

---

Also enjoy our riffs on: Queries
Reports Dashboards