Soapbox Engage Blog

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.

1 day left! Pls submit by 1/28 What's your big dream for 2013? Share your vision for change goo.gl/cxmgi #NonprofitBlogCarnival

— Nancy Schwartz (@NancySchwartz) January 27, 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) routine

In 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?

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.

I've often found my self saying the words, "technology is not a panacea", whenever I hear organizations looking to focus what I think are excessive energy on search engine optimization.  My thoughts have been that spending that time and money on writing great content, rather than trying to manipulate search engine rankings.

But what if a simple technology switch could more effectively highlight your organization's website content in search engine results, and thereby make it more likely that visitors would click on your links rather than others? And what if the solution was easy and affordable?

I figure you'd probably try it.

So, what's this differentiator you can implement immediately for your website?  It's called Rich Snippets.

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?