I recently logged into my account with a major financial services company for the first time in awhile. The next day, I received an email from the company saying “Hey! Thanks for stopping by our site yesterday! S'up?”

That wasn’t verbatim, mind you. But it was close. And it prompts the first in our blog series of simple ideas for successful online nonprofit membership management using Salesforce.

Are you rolling out the online welcome mat for your members? How can you tell and how can you improve so that welcome mat is more welcoming?

Way back in 2004, at the first Advocacy Developer's Summit, I remember sitting in a circle with some really bright non-profit engineers that were promoting the future of a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) protocol, in which thinking a few years down the road, would easily help you discover relationships between you and your friends and potentially provide insight to help you make buying (and supporting) decisions.

Unfortunately, FOAF never really caught on.  Instead, the world became smitten with a walled garden called Facebook, which provided an easy and user-friendly experience for making connections between your friends, and sharing your likes and preferences.

One of the grand visions of FOAF, at least for me, was the idea that as a FOAF network was built, you'd be able to have rather organic connections between individuals that could allow you to be informed based not on advertising, but on the choices made by your friends.  These connections with your friends, while are not expert opinions, tend to have a better correlation with your own interests, and ultimately (hopefully) making your life in a complex choice world easier.

Well, 8 years and hundreds of millions of users later, I think Facebook is now on the verge of providing one of the most compelling discovery tools we've ever seen, and the effects of it likely will be profound for organizations, especially advocacy organizations.

It's all about search.

Needing to draft your own army to move mountains of paperwork for member management? What if there were ways to reduce the workload and increase effectiveness?

Back in August, we posted an article sharing 15 reasons why membership organizations love Non-Profit Soapbox and Salesforce. In it, we offered specific ways the Soapbox platform is being used by nonprofit membership organizations to integrate with their Salesforce instances to increase staff efficiency, bolster member satisfaction, and become more effective in meeting their missions.

As we've been building integrated online solutions for membership organizations, we continue to be impressed by the vast potential that connecting this world-class CRM with one's website has to supercharge member organizations.

With Joomla!Day Melbourne 2013 taking place this week down in Australia, and with my upcoming travel to speak at Joomla!Day India in early February 2013, I took a little time this weekend to reflect on the incredible success of the Joomla open source community.  There's a lot that goes into an open source project that moves it from mediocrity to superstardom, not the least of which is actually the code that people enjoy writing and using.

In thinking about my presentation for Joomla!Day India, one key metric of success stood out amongst all others for the Joomla community:  empowerment.

In my relatively short 15 years in the open source world, I have yet to find another project that is able to as effectively strike the solid balance between attraction of new members that know little-to-nothing about software development, and the hardcore engineers looking to leverage a power web framework.  Based on my years within the Joomla project, and my term serving as a leader of it, I've come to realize that the key differentiator for me has been the community's focus on empowering anyone to contribute.