Back in 2004, PICnet was just a few years old, Soapbox wasn't even an idea yet, and I found myself in Philadelphia with a bunch of non-profit tech geeks.  It was my first Non-Profit Technology Conference (NTC), organized by our good friends at N-TEN. and I remembered thinking to myself, "wow, there's really a lot of other crazy folks interested in non-profit tech."

Little did I know that 10 years later, I'd be registering for the same event.

It's been an incredible string of events during the past 10 years.  The N-TEN community has changed, dramatically, since the early Circuit Rider days, and so has the NTC.  I swear that it seems there are more folks hosting booths at the Science Fair these days then there were total attendees back in the early days!

So this afternoon, when I started working on my annual registration for the NTC 2013 (early bird, of course), I reflected for a moment.  As the N-TEN community has evolved and grown, do I still fit into the new generation of N-TEN folks?  Were my interests back in 2004 the same as they are today, and if so, are they being reflected in the type of event that the NTC has become?  Did I really manually blow up, by hand, 96 penguins with my PICnet buddy Pradeep back at the NTC 2006 in Seattle?

In short:  is the NTC right for a guy like me in 2013?

You're just getting used to a slick new Salesforce app that a developer built for your organization, and its only smooth sailing ahead.  Right?  Until, one day, something doesn't work right.  A record isn't updating properly.  A VisualForce page doesn't load correctly.  Whatever it is, you don't have a clue what's causing it, and you're not seeing any error messages popping up on the screen.

That's when the Salesforce debug log comes to the rescue.  Here's a little guide to understanding what the Salesforce debug log does, and how even an accidental techie can quickly make it your Salesforce troubleshooting friend.

Working at a company that helps organizations figure out how to stay focused when wandering the candy store that is Web technology can be full of interesting anecdotes.  Mostly, it includes stories of accidental techies doing the best they can to make sense of this Web-3-dot-whatever world we're living in, and trying to find ways to best bring in more donation dollars to support their cause.

Sometimes, this means that the shiny new toys which larger companies play with seem to be an absolute necessity when it comes to their own small non-profit website.  This is completely understandable.  We live in an upgrade-right-now world, where even our web browsers seem to update on a daily basis, often times without us knowing it.

We try to help organizations avoid the shine of the latest fad and focus on raw efficiency gains.  That's why a Web lesson learned from the good folks at Etsy (fellow B Corporation!) struck a chord with me.  When Etsy implemented the "infinite scroll" in their A/B testing, their findings were really quite interesting.

What's an infinite scroll you ask?  It's what happens when you're looking at search results on sites like Google Images, where as you scroll to what seems to be the bottom of the page, and then all the sudden, wham, more results start to appear.

The vertical scroll is infinitely long!

Okay, back to the lesson at hand.  What Etsy ended up finding is that while the infinite scroll is definitely trending strongly in web design communities, it's not a tool that you can blindly apply to any website and expect it to actually improve user satisfaction.  In fact, in the case of Etsy, it seemed to cause users to avoid taking the preferred route through the Etsy website.

What does this have to do with non-profit websites?  Quite a bit.  Here's a few important lessons we can learn from the Etsy case study on the infinite scroll.

Each quarter, PICnetters from across the country fly in to our Washington DC headquarters for a one day all-hands meeting to discuss the success of the previous quarter and plan for the quarter ahead.  Since today's Quarterly Connect was our first of the year, it doubles as our annual planning event of the year, giving me an opportunity to share a vision for the company moving forward through the year.

We discussed the unique opportunity our team has in today's environment to take some important steps forward on new products that we've planned for many years.  We've agreed that our Soapbox Engage service's integration with Salesforce, and the tools we've created to help organizations fundraise more effectively online, are key to our clients' success in 2013.  Based on these building blocks, we're excited to work with our clients, partners, and friends to continue expanding our services for the sector.

This plan dovetails nicely with our existing commitment to further evangelize about the Salesforce Foundation's Nonprofit Starter Pack, a service that enables organizations to utilize the Salesforce service more appropriately for charitable organizations.  All of our new products planned for 2013 will have deep integrations with the Salesforce service, benefitting the more than 10,000 organizations currently using Salesforce.