There's a lot of blah blah blah these days about social media this and that. We get it. It's cool. We're down with the Twitters and the Facebookery. But what does it all really add up to? If you share something, how to know if it means squat? UPDATE: The Convio Common Ground Refugee Migration package offering provided by PICnet and Exponent Partners in conjunction with Dreamforce 2012 is now closed. To assist nonprofit refugees forced to flee from the discontinued Convio Common Ground platform. Exponent Partners and PICnet are pleased to present the Convio Common Ground Refugee Migration package. Migrate your nonprofit from Convio Common Ground to the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack. Get real time integration with your website through Soapbox Engage to manage new contacts, events, donations and much more! What’s included? For those hit by the news from Blackbaud last week that Convio Common Ground will be discontinued in 2014, the pressing question at hand is the same that any refugee faces: where to now? In considering options, there are three important aspects of the move to take into account: 1) which CRM platform should be my new home?; 2) how will I move and who can help?; and 3) how will that CRM platform integrate with my website? If this year will be your first time at Salesforce's Dreamforce, don't worry, you're likely to have a lot of non-profit friends in the same boat. With more than 70,000 attendees expected this year, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the sea of humanity crashing downtown San Francisco for the cloud party of the year. Here's a simple checklist of some of my top ways to make the most out of your Dreamforce experience (and yes, it's not a conference, it's an "experience"). As we've freely confessed over and over (and over and over and...), we're sweet on Saleforce. It provides an immensely powerful platform for managing all the relationships a nonprofit has with individuals and organizations. If you're a membership organization, you're all about managing relationships. Here are the top fifteen reasons why membership organizations love the crush Soapbox Engage has on Salesforce: Not to be too brash about it but you want money. Benjamins. Greenbacks. Paper. Cold hard cash. You want it to fund your mission. You want to spend as little of it as possible in staff time to keep track of it. And you don't care in which country the individual giving you that money lives. Now, neither does Soapbox. They say that every challenge is an opportunity. We took that to heart recently when crafting our new approach for onboarding email newsletter sign ups on client websites that create Salesforce Leads to convert to Contacts records. Here's our chosen approach to overcome a common hurdle in this very standard functional need. The challenge is this: We're excited to announce that all Soapbox Mailer organizations can have further peace of mind that their emails have a higher chance of being delivered successfully. Thanks to new features released last night within Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES), Soapbox Mailer users now have another tool in the fight against spam. Yesterday, Chris Wheeler over at the SES team announced that they had launched Easy DKIM, a new feature that makes it very easy for our Soapbox Mailer organizations to increase their deliverability rates. Chris' post provides the details of what DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and you can grab an engineer and learn more details on the DKIM Wikipedia page as well. In short, DKIM makes it easy for your email recipient's mail provider to confirm that your email really did originate from you. This is another tactic to prove that you're not a spammer, which often times forges information in the hidden parts of emails to make them seem like they're coming from someone else. We dig the good folks at Pew Internet. They do some great research to uncover important trends in this, our wired world. Take some numbers from a post summarizing a recent report of theirs: “Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones.” Not shocking news, eh? Yeah, we didn’t think so. This tidbit from another study by Pew Internet won’t be either but the percentages may surprise you :On Tuesday, we posted an update on the latest features we tossed into our Soapbox Donations tool with its integrations with Salesforce. We also compared ourselves to Scrooge McDuck - favorably, of course. He is a lovable Disney character, after all. Beyond the additions to Soapbox Donations, we also made some other tweaks and enhancements to the Soapbox platform. As always, we're indebted in that effort to some great clients offering excellent ideas to implement and identifying annoying bugs to exterminate. Thanks to the following folks for their helpful contributions on both fronts: |