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Eager to get more out of your Soapbox site? Want to hear the inside scoop on new features coming soon to Soapbox? Join your friendly PICnetters for the second annual Soapbox User Summit on Wednesday, May 8, 2013 in Washington, DC!
What do you get when you take Soapbox Events and expand its options for collecting attendee information as part of the reservation process? Why, online event management that's made to order and integrates seamlessly with Salesforce. 'Cause sometimes you just need to ask "Want fries with that?" 
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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As a 
On Thursday last week, 
When we started 
Donations
Events
Petitions
Forms
Shop
Directories