If you're a member organization looking to offer tasty content for a members-only area, we offered a tantalizing idea on Friday for providing logged in users access to private contact information of other members in Salesforce. A valuable service to your members with no additional website management for you.

Today is the same song different verse, this one to the tune of the cash register.

If you collect dues and track them in Salesforce, you've got a pile of valuable data about the times your members have rung the cash register.

Add value to your members-only area by providing logged in users a list of their past payments. Include amounts and dates. Let them know when their membership expires. All through integrating your website with your Salesforce instance.

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.

With our Soapbox platform offering online payments for donations and events, we've had occasion to chat with nonprofits about various payment processors to choose from. PayPal and Authorize.net are two of the three that work with Soapbox. They are well-known and have a raft of opinions associated with them. Some good and some bad.

The third payment processor Soapbox interfaces with is Braintree, an option lesser known in the nonprofit space. And, while we're not looking to endorse any single provider, Braintree is worthy of consideration for some very good reasons:

If you're using Salesforce to track donations, you can generate plenty of helpful fundraising metrics. These can be done across your organization and per fundraising campaign. We'll focus on five common and critical metrics in this post.