Soapbox Engage Blog

Summertime is usually a time to relax – go the beach, put a good burger on the grill, watch fireworks while sipping your beverage of choice from a rooftop. Well, that might be how most people spend their summers in DC, but not for PICnet. We’ve been blasting through the summer with several new site launches! Here are ones that launched in just the first half of August:

NTEN is hosting its monthly happy hour this Thursday, July 28, 2011 at Vapiano M Street. NTEN is the non-profit technology network that has groups all over the United States. The DC group meets the fourth Thursday of every month at a different location throughout the Dupont Circle area.  Not only are the happy hours a great opportunity for non-profits and accidental techies alike to get together and network, but more importantly, they can learn something too! Starting at our last happy hour (May 2011), we’ve incorporated a speaker who presents something interesting and useful about technology and how non-profits can use this technology.  Our speaker for July is Amber Manning from EchoDitto. Amber will be discussing “Doing the Math: Calculating Campaign Success.”  I know I’m looking forward to it!

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Does this sound like an oxymoron or what? Theatre and technology together on one stage? Well you heard correct. Last night, PICnet DC employees got to see The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a monologue performed by the incredibly talented Mike Daisey. And to say that this performance made me think more about technology, how we communicate with one other, as well as labor practices in China, is an understatement.

I promise the reason I left dreary Washington, D.C. behind for 5 days in Los Angeles wasn’t just that it was 70 degrees in mid-February.  Rather, it was the chance to connect with 100 young social innovators from around the world all convening in Santa Monica to discuss trends in social entrepreneurship.  Okay, so the weather didn’t hurt, but I swear it was the chance to learn and grow as a social entrepreneur that inspired me to go.

I was honored to be selected as a StartingBloc fellow, and am incredibly grateful to PICnet for supporting my attendance at their social innovation summit.  In attendance were social entrepreneurs representing six continents, multiple countries, numerous sectors and cause areas, and myriad life experiences.  What connected us all, though, was our passion to employ the toolkit of entrepreneurship to improving the world around us.  From the social entrepreneur addressing sanitation issues in slums in his native India, to a recently-returned Haiti volunteer dedicating his career to teaching others the Creole language to promote cross-cultural communication, the ideas were big, and the action even bigger.

We've been hard at work creating powerful tools to integrate Non-Profit Soapbox with the world-class CRM solution, Salesforce. Yesterday, we extended that a bit further by adding a couple of elegant gems.

The first is filtering Salesforce records displayed in Non-Profit Soapbox based on the Account ID of the logged in visitor. That goes along nicely with the existing ability to filter by the Contact ID of the logged in visitor. "Why would I want to do that", you say? Good question! Let's tackle a few concepts and existing functionality to break that down a bit into meaningful language that gets at why.

This is a guest post by Grey Frandsen, our company's co-founder and inspirational guru.

Dear PICnet Family and Friends:

10 years ago Ryan Ozimek and I set out to create a company to serve organizations with brave and selfless missions.

Our objective was clear: produce highly-functional and cutting-edge technology solutions for organizations that typically were more focused (and rightfully so) on their own critical missions - tackling challenges like homelessness, refugee resettlement, education, emergency response, social justice, community development, cancer treatment, etc.  You know, really important stuff.

Funny enough, though, we didn't start with a product or silver-bullet solution.  We set out only to help these organizations do more for less so they could make a greater impact.  Our work for our first great client led to a second amazing client.  Our second client turned into numbers five, 10, and so on.  As we grew, so too did our understanding of the market, our clients, their challenges, and what PICnet could do to continue to serve a growing number of fantastic organizations.  It actually worked.

To be sure, thought, this vision was pretty unique in 2000.  Serving charitable, non-profit and international NGOs wasn't exactly sexy.  It wasn't where the IPOs were being offered or where the angel investors wanted to spend a lot of time.  In fact, Ryan and I were viewed as "the goodie-two-dudes" by those setting out to make big profits in other, more glamorous arenas.  Better for us, we thought, even if it meant we'd be charting our own course in unknown territory (like Albania, Uganda, or Indonesia).

PICnet co-founder Grey Frandsen during the early days of PICnet

It seems like only yesterday that Grey Frandsen and I were sitting in BJ's Pizza near UCLA in Westwood, California, talking about a concept we believed could provide the world with insight into local politics from around the globe.  It was March 20, 2000, and the concept was called the Political Information Center Network.

Being an efficiency snob, I thought we needed a shorter name.  Grey, with loads of experience from the NGO world and a taste of government experience, thought the acronym "PICnet" might be fitting, because, as I can clearly remember after a long debate on the matter on the steps of my apartment building in Westwood, "it's the one the sounds most similar to 'picnic', and I like food...so I vote for 'PICnet'."

The rest, they say, is history.  Well, you can actually see a little bit of history of PICnet courtesy of the Wayback Machine's image of our early test site on May 11, 2000!

I've been to more than a few conferences this year. Most conferences I attend are squarely focused on either the Joomla! or non-profit technology communities.  That tends to be my comfort zone.  So when I decided to join Melanie and Tim to do some crosstraining and Joomla! evangelism at Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2010 conference, I had no idea what to expect.

The result:  after four days at Dreamforce I was completely exhausted, my mind was swirling with possibilities, and I'd shaken more hands than a politician walking a rope line.  Thank goodness for the "cloud" beanbag areas in San Francisco's Moscone West.

[caption id="attachment_1214" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="PICnetters and SaaSy at Dreamforce 2010"][/caption]

There were more than a few times I asked myself, "is this a rock concert, or am I at a technology conference?"  DJs were spinning in the lobbies of all the conference halls (Dreamforce took over all three of the Moscone conference halls in San Francisco), SaaSy and Chatty (Saleforce's mascots) roamed the halls with big smiles, and the rain didn't keep anyone from staying to see Stevie Wonder, will.i.am and apl.de.ap, and President Bill Clinton make appearances.

But seriously, it wasn't a rock conference.