With the Salsa Community Conference in the books like a Dutch defender, it's full steam ahead into the steaming D.C. summer.

If you subscribe to our Events and Trainings newsletter, you already know all about the full slate of Salsa trainings on the docket for July. This, the week of July 12, is a particularly busy one as it hapens to combine our two recurring monthly training events.

"Salsa 101"

New to Salsa, or have a new person on your team? Especially geared towards newer users, a five-day sequence of webinars on the core tools in the software kicks off today with the aptly-named New User Orientation.

Follow that up with:

• Tuesday, July 13: Supporter Management
• Wednesday, July 14: Email
• Thursday, July 15: Signup Pages & Triggers
• Friday, July 16: The Complete Campaign

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A late addition (too late to make the monthly "upcoming trainings and events" newsletter, which you can sign up for here) to our June events calendar that you won't want to miss:

List-Building Strategy
Tuesday, June 22, 3 pm Eastern
With consultant Matt Holland, formerly of TrueMajority

Learn how you can build your list through cross-promotions with other groups. We'll take a look at how other groups have succesfully grown their lists through this easy, yet underutilized strategy. Register Now >>

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NTEN wrote a book, zippily titled Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders, with chapters by some of our favorite nonprofit consultants on strategic IT planning and implementation for nonprofits.

Many of those authors will be on a virtual release party-slash-free webinar this afternoon at 2 p.m. Eastern.  Rumor has it prizes are involved.

While we're on the subject of NTEN, its signature event, the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, is just four weeks away in San Francisco.  The best and brightest in nonprofit technology from around the world will be there, so it's well worth the trek -- and always highly recommended as great value for anyone in the region who's never been to one before.  NTEN's blog has more to get you in the spirit, including interviews with presenters like Farra Trompeter.

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Catch us breaking out of our 9-to-5 box today and tomorrow with evening sessions of our introductory webinars -- great for volunteers who have other jobs and west coasters.

Wednesday, Mar. 25: List Management, 7 p.m. Eastern.
Thursday, Mar. 26: Email Basics, 7 p.m. Eastern.

Should we do more of these? Should we find even later hours? Drop us a line, or talk it over on Salsa Commons.

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Salsa's campaign managers should have received the notification, but we pushed out an upgraded e-mail package last week.  Though the old e-mail tool will remain supported until June, the new tool is all that and a bag of chips right now.

Here's how to add the package:

• Click on "Accounts" in the upper right hand corner of your dashboard
• Then, click "Manage Your Packages" in the bottom right-hand box
• "Click here to add the new Email Blast Package"

That's it! Once you've installed it, you can begin e-mailing with it immediately, and you'll find all the great options you're used to, plus some brand new functionality.

Not sure?  Want to test the waters?  Documentation for the new e-mail package is already available. We'll also be offering webinars to help orient everyone this afternoon at 2 p.m. and on Monday, March 30. (All future e-mail webinars will use the new package.)

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DemocracyInAction is back to hunting inexpensive webinar/online conferencing tools. A few weeks ago, our our existing provider sent us an e-mail announcing:

We have decided to significantly change our company's focus, thereby exiting the web conferencing business completely. Because of this business decision, we have stopped renewing existing subscriptions and have ceased selling new subscriptions for our ASAP products.

Since "Convoq is an innovative provider of SaaS integrated online meeting and live chat systems", that must have been one heck of a business decision. All the same, in our two-plus years using Convoq's ASAP tool, we've had great results, so we bid our erstwhile collaborators fair tidings on their journey which we hope does not necessitate harbor in a capitalized and numbered Chapter. What it certainly does is thrust DIA back into the market for online meeting tools.

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Either by accident or some inscrutable will of the cosmos, three different parties in the last month or so have come knocking for insight into web meeting tools. Since we run regular webinars, we traffic this space a bit -- and while I'd hardly characterize any of us here as experts in the field of online meeting software, it's not inconceivable that the evaluation of tools we've had to do might be useful to others.

If you're looking for web meeting/screencasting/live presentation software that's more affordable than the name-brands like WebEx, there are some pretty good options available, with an open source project in the pipes. DemocracyInAction uses ASAP by Convoq, which costs $500 a year but has unlimited meetings, and very rarely have poor feedback on it from clients: meeting participants just need a recent version of Flash. A few months ago, we re-upped for a second year.

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