Soapbox Engage Blog

With the new year approaching, you may be considering a fresh start for your organization’s website. Updating your design can be a great way to reinvigorate your site and attract more attention to your cause.

PICnet client Drops Fill Buckets (DFB) recently undertook a redesign to kick off their next organizational growth spurt … and the result is stunning! As an organization committed to “empowering individuals to raise money for tangible local and international needs that they personally care about,” their website is a critical piece in the puzzle for their mission. DFB’s site serves as a hub for team fundraising by enabling their organizers to plan events, leverage sponsors, and motivate friends and family to support projects.

It always warms our hearts to see our organizations get the support they deserve.  Earlier today, a new link appeared on the Google.com homepage. "'Tis the season. Google supports organizations that are changing the world."

The reason? The Google Foundation announced a $40 million grant allocation to non-profit organizations, including our Soapbox client, Polaris Project, to help tackle important challenges around the world. One of their key areas of focus, "fighting human trafficking and modern-day slavery," is the cornerstone of the work done by our friends at the Polaris Project.

Google just released some major upgrades to Google Analytics that make it extremely valuable for anyone managing a website. So, if you haven’t logged into your account for a while, or if perhaps you never got around to signing up for one, now is the time to immerse yourself in Google Analytics.

Here are a few things that have changed:

• Real Time Reporting: This means you no longer have to wait around to view how people interacted with your site in the past. Instead, you can see how people are using your site right now. With this feature you can more directly track how changes to your site are affecting the way people are interacting with it. For example, if you add a new homepage banner to your website about your Thanksgiving Food Drive in preparation for your drive being featured on a local radio station, go to GA while they are announcing the food drive and see if people are clicking on the banner during the radio segment. It will help you to learn whether or not the banner was an effective addition to your website.

As a B Corp, PICnet puts an emphasis on people, environment, and then profits.  We have higher legal standards and must meet comprehensive social and environmental standards.  For many businesses, this school of thinking might be backward, but for B Corps, it’s a part of our vision and goals. There are more than 450 B Corporations in 60 various industries across the United States and Europe.  PICnet was proud to become a B Corp in April of 2010.

So it makes perfect sense that as a B Corp, we support other B Corporations whose similarly-minded business models fit in so perfectly with ours. When I learned about Give Something Back, a fellow B Corporation that offers office supplies at a cheaper rate than the average office supply chain, I jumped at the chance to purchase and help support a fellow B Corp. What I found is that the products were not only much cheaper, but I also received free shipping AND had them delivered next day.

Sounds great so far, right? Here's the kicker: Give Something Back donates 75% of their profits to their community; that is 75x the national corporate giving average! They've been changing the game since 1991 and were one of the founding B Corps.

From time to time, non-profits come to us wondering what they can do to improve their search engine standings. We recently came across a great video straight from the horse's mouth, specifically Matt Cutts of Google, that serves as a great reminder of what is really the secret behind good search results—good websites! Watch this video to see what we mean, but here are a few spoilers:

Not feeling inspired to add new content to your website? Don’t let a difficult platform get in your way! Our Non-Profit Soapbox CMS was designed for accidental techies like you so that you can leave your troubles behind and focus on what’s important—adding fresh, engaging content for your audience!

But you don’t have to take our word for it.

We shared this week and last about tools in Soapbox Engage that allow you to display data from your Salesforce account. You can share all sorts of information you've got socked away in all sorts of compelling ways - either on one site or across an entire network of sites. With Soapbox Engage, Salesforce isn't just your data repository, it's your megaphone. And oh, what a megaphone it is!

But you're not interested in simply droning on and on and on to your visitors, incessantly talking and never listening. You want to hear from them. You want them to contact you or sign petitions or submit job applications or apply for grants or do hundreds of other things that require communication back to your organization.

On Friday, we enlisted Fozzie Bear to paint a picture of all the great ways you can display your Salesforce data within a website. What if you don't have one website but two? Or twelve? Or two hundred and twelve?

What if you're the national headquarters of an affiliate network with fifty affiliates all over the country? Or an international headquarters with affiliates in every major city, borough, hamlet, and village in every country across this fair planet of ours? Tell me: what good is including all that good Salesforce data you've got in one measly, little old site going to do for you?

How amazing would it be if you could push all of that data you're looking to share from just one Salesforce instance to not just one website but to every single one of your affiliate sites?

Honestly, good gentles, 'tis child's play for Soapbox Engage! Read on! Read on!

You’ve got data. It’s nice data. It’s data about people and places and things. It’s members and donors and clients and locations and dues and grants and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!). And all of that lovely data is safely and securely stored in your Salesforce.com account.

But you’re a giving, sharing kind of person. You’re not a greedy and selfish and man-sized-safe-in-your-office secretive kind of person. You want to share that data. Not everything, mind you! That would be just self-absorbed foolishness. But you want to share important bits and pieces that will be valuable to your website visitors and beneficial in achieving your mission.

The Salesforce.com adoption rate within the non-profit sector continues to grow.  To be specific, more than 11,000 organization!  With this growth comes a new community of Salesforce consultants focused on helping organizations use these tools effectively.

We've sat down with many of these consultants, and listened to their hopes, concerns, and ideas.  How can we help organizations use these to their highest benefit?  What are ways we can help organizations be more efficient with their data processing?

For example, right now it can be time-consuming and sometimes difficult to importing data into Salesforce, especially in real-time from external Web resources.  Think donation pages, event registration pages, petitions, etc.  In tough economic times, organizations are also feeling a budget pinch, and they're not in a position to invest in custom Web development to connect to their Salesforce instance.

Well, have we got a little pain relief for everyone.

With our recent release of Soapbox Engage, Salesforce consultants can bolt on ready-to-deploy donation pages, event registration pages, web forms, and even searchable directories...all of which talk to Salesforce in real-time.  Even better, consultants are able to keep clients' CFOs happy with extremely affordable services.

What makes Soapbox Engage such a good fit for Salesforce consultants?

Far too often, non-profits are left on the dull-edge of technology, sacrificing innovation for affordability.  At PICnet, we believe the ability to effectively raise funds, organize events, and mobilize supporters should be within the reach of any organization.

Organizations shouldn’t have to fundraise to afford the next generation of fundraising software.

As a company dedicated to hitting this challenge head-on, we are thrilled to announce the beta release of Soapbox Engage, the first-of-its-kind suite of donation, events, search, and submit tools that leverage the power of Salesforce.com for non-profits. Our goal is to tear down the barriers to entry for organizations that want to more effectively use the Web to collect and expose data from Salesforce.

So your ears perked up when you heard the magic words “Salesforce” and “your website”, but now you want to know what exactly this thing can do.  Here’s a breakdown of the powerful new features that Soapbox Engage will provide, building an easy but powerful bridge to Salesforce for your organization's data collection and display needs.

Greetings! My name is Amber, and I am the newest gem on the PICnet team. I came on board at the beginning of October as a Project Manager in the Washington, DC office. I am very excited to be joining PICnet, and I look forward to helping our clients build and manage their Soapbox sites.

A pure accidental techie — I came to work in this industry (believe it or not) through a babysitting job I had after college. One of my favorite things about being a Project Manager is being able to collect and share some of the best free online tools that are available.

Since 2006, our robust Non-Profit Soapbox platform has served more than 350 organizations, empowering them with the quality, easy-to-use, flexible, affordable (we could go on...) web tools they need to carry out their missions. Soapbox has gone through several important milestones in its history:

2006: launch of the non-profit community’s very own hosted web platform, Soapbox 1.0, optimized for their specific needs, based on years of best practice captured by PICnetters
2008: launch of Soapbox 2.0, the next-generation of Soapbox goodness with a slew of hot new features: an upgraded CMS framework, integration with Google Analytics, human readable URLs, and more
2010: development of Soapbox integration with the world’s leading CRM tool, Salesforce.com. Non-profits are no longer left behind in the wake of technological advancements, and instead they now enjoy a full-fledged integration of a website CMS with Salesforce for donations, events, and more.
2011: beta launch of Soapbox Engage, bringing the power of Salesforce-integrated websites to the masses

Technology advances so quickly that sometimes it’s fun to stop and take a look back at how far we’ve come—for the web as a whole and for our beloved Soapbox platform in particular. Here’s a trip down memory lane for the recently upgraded Virginia Water Environment Association (VWEA) website. We’re super thrilled to have grown up alongside VWEA, and even more excited to upgrade them a new site!

Phil Penn Gwynn must be feeling like a proud papa penguin!  Two of our Non-Profit Soapbox sites took home 2011 Wilmer Shields Rich Gold Awards from the Council on Foundations for their websites!  These awards recognize effective communications efforts to increase public awareness of foundations and corporate giving programs.  Please put your fins together for The Hitachi Foundation and the Global Fund for Women!