Online petitions can be an effective way for your nonprofit to build support around an issue while expanding your mailing list - even if your not primarily an advocacy organization.

Done right, and with the right service, petitions can be an outstanding addition to a complete engagement path that cultivates more donations and supporters for your nonprofit.

But how do you know if the service you are considering is the right service? Here are ten questions every nonprofit should ask when considering an online petition tool.

Are you getting the most of out your organization's communications megaphone?

Review these three quick content pointers - and grab our free Soapbox Communication Planner to help you plan the publishing of that content for maximum effect.

PICnet is proud to welcome CloudFixer as the latest certified Soapbox Engage Partner. CloudFixer automatically improves, cleans and maintains your Salesforce instance for you. In this guest blog post, they share tips from their data custodial expertise that can benefit your nonprofit.

By Ehren Foss, Founder and Managing Partner of CloudFixer

This nonprofit-focused Salesforce stuff is pretty snazzy, don’t you think? People are building everything from online fundraising apps and wealth data sources to special migration tools and lots of other things to lower the cost of doing good.

Soapbox Engage and Soapbox Mailer for Salesforce have assembled several widely trusted components (Joomla and Amazon Web Services) into something many nonprofits need, like simple event signups, donation forms, and a mass email tool integrating with Salesforce.  These basic components can be quite a challenge to assemble and interconnect without a service like Engage.

It's the "little" things that can bog down a DIY nonprofit person, like mobile-friendly templates. Having many of these snags taken care of by the platform is a plus. I also like how Soapbox unobtrusively inserts data as Leads, thereby working more seamlessly with the many different Salesforce data models we've seen in the wild.

One other "little thing" that can drag down your organization is data hygiene. If you aren’t careful, you might not end up so happy with duplicates, staff turnover, and unused reports.

You have probably heard the phrase “content is king” when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for your website. While I would never denounce this self-evident truth in the SEO world, great content means less without links.

Links to your content are signs of trust to search engines. They tell Google, Bing, and others that your content is authoritative and worthy, especially when its other sites with strong reputations that link back to your website. These types of links are appropriately called “linkbacks”.

They are evidence to search engines that sites are shouting about what you've published and that others should take notice.

Here are two tips for grabbing some low-hanging linkback fruit to improve your SEO and increase organic search traffic:

We posted a great little tidbit the other day regarding the authorship service available to Google+ Profile owners and how it can help increase traffic to your site.

By following Google's instructions for verifying authorship of content on a website, search results will display your Google+ Profile headshot and a link to other content you've written, increasing the likelihood that your link will get clicked:

We followed the instructions provided by Google for our own blog and can report back the following: