It's my pleasure to announce the release of Salsa 1.8.1. Our development staff returned to work refreshed in the New Year, and has been hard at work ever since. This is our largest release in more than 18 months, and you can read about all the nitty/gritty details here. Before you do, here are four feature highlights.

Make Your CCV2 Fields Required

If you shop online, you probably know your "CVV2 code," that little set of numbers parked right next to your signature. It's an added security measure that allows merchant gateways to protect against theives and fraud artists. Many of the gateways that integrate with Salsa, such as PayPal's PayFlow Pro, offer protection plans that require this field when processing transactions. Salsa donation pages now support required CVV2 codes. Simply point your browser at the merchant gateway options in the account admin page, and check the "Require cvv2" checkbox.

Break Your Email Statistics Down By Domain

Previous versions of Salsa offered the ability to break email recipients down by domain, but 1.8.1 makes this feature even better. Users with the "Email Statistics" package can view a detailed report on any recipient domain. Care to know how many supporters with gmail.com addresses converted on that last blast? Now you can find out.

If you'd like access to the "Email Statistics" package, please don't hestitate to contact support.

Export Your Email Summary Reports

The last four years spawned innumerable innovations in online organizing and communication but they've also witnessed deep changes to the way advocacy organizations must work. Effective online campaigns, much like effective field operations, are not molded by gurus or fly-by-night policy pundits. They are driven by data. There's simply no way around it: In the land of the blind, the organization with the NCEC-matched, issue-integrated, demographically-cross-tabbed list is king.

One of our missions is to make your data available to you whenever you want however you want. Toward that end, our developers completely reworked the email blast summary report screen, adding the ability to filter your results by more than a dozen fields, breakdown your stats by group, see them develop in live time, and if you still don't get what you want you can export it all. That's right: Drop your data into tab-delimited, CSV, HTML, or Excel format, and go wild with data fever.

Joining a Group Trigger Emails

Of all the bug fixes and features in Salsa 1.8.1, this is our favorite. Our clients have asked us to add email triggers to groups for years. I'm proud to announce that with today's release, it's now possible to trigger an email every time a supporter joins a group.

Imagine the possibilities: Suppose you track a group of potential donors called, unsurprisingly, "Potential Donors". Now suppose you've a dozen different signup pages, all auto-adding new supporters to the group. Before 1.8.1, you'd have to manually query this group for new additions, drop those supporters into another group so they can be contacted, and then reach out to them with the email blast tool. These three steps are now one. You can now assign trigger emails to specific groups. Want your finance director to know every time someone joins the group? Let Salsa handle that. Want to automatically make a donation ask when the supporter joins? Don't worry. We've got you covered. We see a bottomless well of possibilities in this feature, and they're all available on the "Options" tab of the "Manage Groups" workflow in Supporter Management.

These are but four of the more than 30 bug fixes and features released in 1.8.1. We're always looking for feedback on Salsa, so please don't hesitate to post any you might have to Salsa Commons. We're looking forward to an amazing development year in 2011. Keep your feeds tuned to this blog for more details on Salsa 1.8.2, scheduled for early February.

Keep organizing. Keep working. And win every hour.