Soapbox Engage Blog

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?

Way back in 2004, at the first Advocacy Developer's Summit, I remember sitting in a circle with some really bright non-profit engineers that were promoting the future of a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) protocol, in which thinking a few years down the road, would easily help you discover relationships between you and your friends and potentially provide insight to help you make buying (and supporting) decisions.

Unfortunately, FOAF never really caught on.  Instead, the world became smitten with a walled garden called Facebook, which provided an easy and user-friendly experience for making connections between your friends, and sharing your likes and preferences.

One of the grand visions of FOAF, at least for me, was the idea that as a FOAF network was built, you'd be able to have rather organic connections between individuals that could allow you to be informed based not on advertising, but on the choices made by your friends.  These connections with your friends, while are not expert opinions, tend to have a better correlation with your own interests, and ultimately (hopefully) making your life in a complex choice world easier.

Well, 8 years and hundreds of millions of users later, I think Facebook is now on the verge of providing one of the most compelling discovery tools we've ever seen, and the effects of it likely will be profound for organizations, especially advocacy organizations.

It's all about search.

Needing to draft your own army to move mountains of paperwork for member management? What if there were ways to reduce the workload and increase effectiveness?

Back in August, we posted an article sharing 15 reasons why membership organizations love Non-Profit Soapbox and Salesforce. In it, we offered specific ways the Soapbox platform is being used by nonprofit membership organizations to integrate with their Salesforce instances to increase staff efficiency, bolster member satisfaction, and become more effective in meeting their missions.

As we've been building integrated online solutions for membership organizations, we continue to be impressed by the vast potential that connecting this world-class CRM with one's website has to supercharge member organizations.

With Joomla!Day Melbourne 2013 taking place this week down in Australia, and with my upcoming travel to speak at Joomla!Day India in early February 2013, I took a little time this weekend to reflect on the incredible success of the Joomla open source community.  There's a lot that goes into an open source project that moves it from mediocrity to superstardom, not the least of which is actually the code that people enjoy writing and using.

In thinking about my presentation for Joomla!Day India, one key metric of success stood out amongst all others for the Joomla community:  empowerment.

In my relatively short 15 years in the open source world, I have yet to find another project that is able to as effectively strike the solid balance between attraction of new members that know little-to-nothing about software development, and the hardcore engineers looking to leverage a power web framework.  Based on my years within the Joomla project, and my term serving as a leader of it, I've come to realize that the key differentiator for me has been the community's focus on empowering anyone to contribute.

When the Nathan Cummings Foundation came to us in search of a robust online application system integrated with their Salesforce instance to support their Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship, we jumped at the opportunity.

It was a great chance to use our Salesforce integration tools in Non-Profit Soapbox to support an outstanding fellowship program that empowers visionary world changers fostering social good.

It is also a great example of a foundation working with a B Corporation to foster social good.

Back in 2004, PICnet was just a few years old, Soapbox wasn't even an idea yet, and I found myself in Philadelphia with a bunch of non-profit tech geeks.  It was my first Non-Profit Technology Conference (NTC), organized by our good friends at N-TEN. and I remembered thinking to myself, "wow, there's really a lot of other crazy folks interested in non-profit tech."

Little did I know that 10 years later, I'd be registering for the same event.

It's been an incredible string of events during the past 10 years.  The N-TEN community has changed, dramatically, since the early Circuit Rider days, and so has the NTC.  I swear that it seems there are more folks hosting booths at the Science Fair these days then there were total attendees back in the early days!

So this afternoon, when I started working on my annual registration for the NTC 2013 (early bird, of course), I reflected for a moment.  As the N-TEN community has evolved and grown, do I still fit into the new generation of N-TEN folks?  Were my interests back in 2004 the same as they are today, and if so, are they being reflected in the type of event that the NTC has become?  Did I really manually blow up, by hand, 96 penguins with my PICnet buddy Pradeep back at the NTC 2006 in Seattle?

In short:  is the NTC right for a guy like me in 2013?

We shared awhile back about the flexibility Soapbox provides in displaying Salesforce records within your website. We featured some snaps of Fozzy Bear to give a glimpse of how your Salesforce data can come alive on the web page.

Well, move over Fozzy. The B Corporation website sets a whole new standard for dynamic, visually-compelling Salesforce integration.

Take the Soapbox Two-Minute Tour in this video to see how those integrations power a directory of Certified B Corporations:

You're just getting used to a slick new Salesforce app that a developer built for your organization, and its only smooth sailing ahead.  Right?  Until, one day, something doesn't work right.  A record isn't updating properly.  A VisualForce page doesn't load correctly.  Whatever it is, you don't have a clue what's causing it, and you're not seeing any error messages popping up on the screen.

That's when the Salesforce debug log comes to the rescue.  Here's a little guide to understanding what the Salesforce debug log does, and how even an accidental techie can quickly make it your Salesforce troubleshooting friend.