Soapbox Engage Blog

You're a consultant. You know Salesforce.com like the back of your hand. You use this power for good - not evil! - by working with groovy non-profits heaven-bent on crushing disease or feeding hungry folks or lovin' Mother Earth or doing any manner of creatively-inspired mayhem that cultivates the social good. And you help make that happen through Salesforce.com development.

That's you, eh? Sweet! We like you already!

We're two of a kind, we tell ya. And we should totally hook up.

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.
Are you a Common Ground refugee looking for options? PICnet's Convio Common Ground Refugee Email Hotline is still available at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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: