A big shout out to the good folks over at Causeway Interactive, the latest certified Soapbox Engage Partner. Causeway connects nonprofit organizations with technology to help them operate more effectively, connect with larger audiences and raise more money. In other words, they are a match made in heaven for us and our Soapbox Engage platform! 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. At PICnet, we love what we do. Deeply. And the prime numero uno reason for this is that we work with great clients who are rocking the world for social good. Who is the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council?Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, or GPAC, is a membership-based organization that represents more than 2,500 individuals in the Pittsburgh area. Using a three-pronged approach of obtaining political, financial, and professional support, they provide a space for artists to post jobs, attend classes, seek legal and business advice, and network. Why Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council rocksWith Oscar season upon us, we’re seeing frequent trailers for films nominated for the little golden trophy. One trailer, that for Django Unchained, contains a line that has us feeling philosophical about your nonprofit and its online presence. And, no, it's not The D is silent. What catches our ear is this line delivered in DiCaprio’s affected Southern drawl: 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: For those watching this little blog, you've seen us up our game over the last couple of months to publish regular content on tech strategy and news you can use to supercharge your mission. 'Cause, in the spirit of the O'Jays classic, we're aiming to give the people what they want. Make sure you don't miss a beat and follow us on Twitter at @picnet for all the latest news. We are happy to announce that the good folks at Idealist Consulting have become the latest certified Soapbox Engage Partner. Idealist Consulting has helped over 500 nonprofits and higher ed institutions deploy Salesforce, including organizations implementing Soapbox Engage for online donations, event management, serachable directories, and form submission that integrate with Salesforce. Not every organization looking to roll out a brand new web presence has the advantage Holy Trinity Church of Georgetown Pike (HTC) enjoyed: a volunteer leading the project who has been founder and CEO of several DC area technology startups. Phillip Merrick knew the possibilities of a robust and integrated online presence and its importance to a startup, whether that be a business or a church: "As a newly formed church preparing to launch our ministries and outreach, we needed more than just a website. We needed a platform to support a digital footprint spanning social media, web video and traditional email marketing, together with an integrated database on the back-end." 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: PICnet, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC Register today! Salesforce.com is predicted to become the leading constituent relationship management (CRM) application in the world in 2013. It is ranked as the most innovative company in the world by Forbes. That's ahead of Apple and Amazon and others. And it gives away its product away free of charge for up to 10 user licenses to nonprofits and higher education institutions - with deep discounts beyond those initial 10 licenses. More and more organizations are adopting Salesforce.com as their CRM of choice to supercharge social change. There are more than 16,000 that have done so already. How can your organization get the most out of Salesforce.com to transform its mission through a CRM that works as hard as you do? Nonprofits have several ways individuals can support their missions - through volunteering, attending an event, signing a petition, making a donation, becoming a member, and more. Nonprofits would love to have each individual support them in ALL of the ways they provide. Like any relationship, those steps of engagement with your organization happen incrementally over time. Just as one doesn't meet a promising someone at a bar and instantly get down on one knee to pop the question, organizations need to work a little romance over time to nurture and expand a relationship with each individual. That's called moving them up the engagement ladder in nonprofit-speak. As a B Corp, PICnet knows the importance of putting people and environment before profits. So we always get excited when more companies join the ranks. Each quarter, B Lab, the nonprofit organization that supports and fosters businesses to solve social and environmental problems, holds a State of the B Corp address where they update all the B Corps on what success they've had in the last quarter. And from last week's call, I can tell you that B Corps had a banner 2012! Here are some highlights: On Thursday last week, Twitter, the company that lead the world in an effort to compress text communications into 140-character snippets, announced their newest way to miniaturize human communication: 6 second videos. Their new service, called Vine, makes it very easy to create extremely short video clips on a mobile device and then instantly share them with the world on the Twitter network. Unlike the longer video clips that you're probably producing and then distributing via other channels such as YouTube or Vimeo, Twitter purposefully intends to make you focus on getting to the point very, very fast. Your video displays directly within your Tweet, and directly within your Twitter stream. The videos you produce on Vine loop, and for those that remember the good old days of Web 1.0, definitely have a feeling of the animated GIF returning to popular culture. Twitter describes Vine like this: Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger. They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life. They're quirky, and we think that's part of what makes them so special. As communication professionals trying to move supporters and donors up the ladder of engagement, how might Vine be useful for your online communication strategies? Here's a few ideas that could be useful for organizations starting to explore the benefits of these short video clips. When we started PICnet back in 2001 (well, technically in 1999 over pizza near UCLA, but lest I digress), we made a decision early on that set the tone for our company moving forward: if we can aim to crush inefficiencies in non-profits, maybe, just maybe, we can help our social sector move towards improved outcomes that can lead to a more just and peaceful world. Pretty lofty stuff, right? What I think is most interesting, however, is that we were talking about increasing operational efficiency for organizations as a tech startup growing at the height of the dot-com boom. That was quite different from what other Web development firms were doing back then, most of which was pitching hip things you can do with a Flash-based website, imploring the need to invest deep 5-digit budgets into shiny bells and whistles for websites, and encouraging the building of custom or proprietary software. So when Nancy Schwartz, publisher of the Getting Attention blog, shared her request for feedback on this year's Nonprofit Blog Carnival, I thought it would be good for us at PICnet to share one of our dreams for the social sector in 2013.
Incredibly enough, in a few weeks, our company PICnet will be 12 years old. Considering that the idea for it started during a student government campaign at UCLA in May 1999, I've been working at the same job for almost 14 years. To put that in perspective, on average, most folks in my generation are on their fourth job at this point in life. I've experienced it all in growing a small business, as most boot-strappers have before me. From the soaring to the highest of highs, to the falling to the lowest of lows. Through the process, I've learned more than I ever could have imagined about business, but more importantly, about the relationships you build with others that keep you moving forward. I'm so incredibly thankful to have been blessed with such a great support network of people that truly care about me. As I say quite often, the relationships we build are more important than the tools we build. But even with friends, family, and loved ones there to support you, few, if any, really understand what is running through that entrepreneurial head of yours. No matter how fantastic your business is doing, as an entrepreneur, you're always working harder than you were the day before. Running through our minds is often the quote from Andy Grove: "only the paranoid survive." If you're a fellow entrepreneur, or you're getting ready to venture off into the startup of your own business, I have one small bit of advice for you. Don't go it alone. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not speaking about your business partner decision. I'm talking about starting right now, today, your very own entrepreneurial social safety net. This is the first of an occasional PICnet blog series: Project Management Quick Tip. These quick tips are lessons that we Project Managers have learned in our work to keep things on time, on budget, and most importantly, to make sure that we have happy clients. We, the PICnet Project Management team, may not be perfect but we are constantly pursuing greatness - yes, greatness! We offer these tips from lessons learned in that pursuit. Here's our first quick tip that will hopefully help you in your own project management work: Develop a start and end of the week (and day) routineIn the past few months at PICnet, we've been focusing heavily on increasing our marketing efforts, particularly through our blog. Just as we do for most top-level programs, we've set goals, take regular measurements, analyze the results in detail, the rinse and repeat. Our tool of trade for building our metrics for success is Google Analytics, and it's been serving us amazingly well. As we're seeing further increases in traffic, we're interested in knowing what people were searching when they found our site. Knowing that information allows us to better define our content strategies for the future, and give us a sense of what content is most interesting to those searching for answers online. It seems, however, that the most popular search keyword, by huge margins, is "(not provided)". And when I say huge margins, I mean it's 58x more popular a keyword than number two. What is this "(not provided)" keyword in Google , and why are we getting so much traffic from it? |