Soapbox Engage Blog

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.

The New York Anti-Violence Project (AVP):

"empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and HIV-affected communities and allies to end all forms of violence through organizing and education, and supports survivors through counseling and advocacy."

This great organization's website however, was not reflecting the richness of the organization's work.

Working at a company that helps organizations figure out how to stay focused when wandering the candy store that is Web technology can be full of interesting anecdotes.  Mostly, it includes stories of accidental techies doing the best they can to make sense of this Web-3-dot-whatever world we're living in, and trying to find ways to best bring in more donation dollars to support their cause.

Sometimes, this means that the shiny new toys which larger companies play with seem to be an absolute necessity when it comes to their own small non-profit website.  This is completely understandable.  We live in an upgrade-right-now world, where even our web browsers seem to update on a daily basis, often times without us knowing it.

We try to help organizations avoid the shine of the latest fad and focus on raw efficiency gains.  That's why a Web lesson learned from the good folks at Etsy (fellow B Corporation!) struck a chord with me.  When Etsy implemented the "infinite scroll" in their A/B testing, their findings were really quite interesting.

What's an infinite scroll you ask?  It's what happens when you're looking at search results on sites like Google Images, where as you scroll to what seems to be the bottom of the page, and then all the sudden, wham, more results start to appear.

The vertical scroll is infinitely long!

Okay, back to the lesson at hand.  What Etsy ended up finding is that while the infinite scroll is definitely trending strongly in web design communities, it's not a tool that you can blindly apply to any website and expect it to actually improve user satisfaction.  In fact, in the case of Etsy, it seemed to cause users to avoid taking the preferred route through the Etsy website.

What does this have to do with non-profit websites?  Quite a bit.  Here's a few important lessons we can learn from the Etsy case study on the infinite scroll.

RSS can be a little confusing.  I try to remember it like this: it's a no-nonsense way to push content from a website, or pull content into a website.

Each quarter, PICnetters from across the country fly in to our Washington DC headquarters for a one day all-hands meeting to discuss the success of the previous quarter and plan for the quarter ahead.  Since today's Quarterly Connect was our first of the year, it doubles as our annual planning event of the year, giving me an opportunity to share a vision for the company moving forward through the year.

We discussed the unique opportunity our team has in today's environment to take some important steps forward on new products that we've planned for many years.  We've agreed that our Soapbox Engage service's integration with Salesforce, and the tools we've created to help organizations fundraise more effectively online, are key to our clients' success in 2013.  Based on these building blocks, we're excited to work with our clients, partners, and friends to continue expanding our services for the sector.

This plan dovetails nicely with our existing commitment to further evangelize about the Salesforce Foundation's Nonprofit Starter Pack, a service that enables organizations to utilize the Salesforce service more appropriately for charitable organizations.  All of our new products planned for 2013 will have deep integrations with the Salesforce service, benefitting the more than 10,000 organizations currently using Salesforce.

With our Soapbox platform offering online payments for donations and events, we've had occasion to chat with nonprofits about various payment processors to choose from. PayPal and Authorize.net are two of the three that work with Soapbox. They are well-known and have a raft of opinions associated with them. Some good and some bad.

The third payment processor Soapbox interfaces with is Braintree, an option lesser known in the nonprofit space. And, while we're not looking to endorse any single provider, Braintree is worthy of consideration for some very good reasons:

The good folks over at Socialbrite have put together an awesome list of non-profit-related events for 2013 that will sure fill your brain with ideas and keep you in the good graces with your frequent flier program.  Of course, if you go to all of these events, not only will you be breaking the laws of physics, but you might never be able to deploy your new skills back at your organization.

So, to help you short-list what you shouldn't miss in 2013, here's a little cheatsheet we've compiled about the events we make sure to attend each year.