With this week's second inauguration of President Obama, and the announcement of the new Organizing for Action nonprofit, the world has seen first-hand that the future of advocacy is data, data, and data.  As the President begins his second term, we're likely to see the debate over important social issues of our time become even more competitive than before.  Now is the time for organizations to gear up for the next wave of advocacy.

Earlier today, we covered how the Obama campaign successfully utilized it's strong database tools to run important A/B communication testing to determine message effectiveness.  While it's going to be rare for an advocacy group to have the war chest of funds that the presidential campaigns had this year, there's a powerful database tool that we believe is about to see a significant uptick in the advocacy world in 2013:  Salesforce.com.

The question:  how can your advocacy group get started using Salesforce, and even the open source Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP), to build a successful campaign database and platform?

Here's three ideas you can implement right away to start using Salesforce for your advocacy work.

As the nation's capital cleans up from the weekend's Inaugural festivities, it's worth asking how we got here:

How was it that President Obama came to be standing on the steps of the Capitol being sworn for a second term rather than his rival, Governor Mitt Romney, being sworn in for his first?

One undeniable factor was that Obama's Digital Team ran one of the most successful online campaigns ever.

Curious about how?

If you're one of the thousands of organizations using the Salesforce Foundation's open source Nonprofit Starter Pack, you have a good understanding of the great features and power that comes under the hood.  It's one of the world's best fundraising apps sitting atop one of the best cloud platforms, and it's improving every day.

For some of you, open source software might be a new and somewhat mysterious concept.  Luckily, there's a not-so-well-kept secret to  but the immense power of it is what enables so many fabulous organizations to use the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP):  you have the power to contribute to it and make it better.  The question is, how?

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.

Tell us if this sounds familiar: you're a membership organization that wants to have a members-only section - but you have no idea what to put in your members-only section that will encourage members to login and login often?

You're not alone. It's a common dilemma member organizations face. Since content is king on the interwebs, you don't want to unnecessarily restrict great content to only logged in members when if really should be public. You also likely don't have time to create regular and robust content exclusively for a members-only section.

So, how do you share enticing, mouth-watering members-only content they'll want to login to dig into without doubling your web management task?

For websites integrating with Salesforce, there will be a few great ideas to consider. None will require additional staff time to manage content beyond what you already do. Each will encourage folks to login.