Soapbox Engage Blog

We're excited to announce that all Soapbox Mailer organizations can have further peace of mind that their emails have a higher chance of being delivered successfully. Thanks to new features released last night within Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES), Soapbox Mailer users now have another tool in the fight against spam.

Yesterday, Chris Wheeler over at the SES team announced that they had launched Easy DKIM, a new feature that makes it very easy for our Soapbox Mailer organizations to increase their deliverability rates.  Chris' post provides the details of what DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and you can grab an engineer and learn more details on the DKIM Wikipedia page as well.

In short, DKIM makes it easy for your email recipient's mail provider to confirm that your email really did originate from you.  This is another tactic to prove that you're not a spammer, which often times forges information in the hidden parts of emails to make them seem like they're coming from someone else.

We dig the good folks at Pew Internet. They do some great research to uncover important trends in this, our wired world. Take some numbers from a post summarizing a recent report of theirs:

“Nearly half (46%) of American adults are smartphone owners as of February 2012, an increase of 11 percentage points over the 35% of Americans who owned a smartphone last May. Two in five adults (41%) own a cell phone that is not a smartphone, meaning that smartphone owners are now more prevalent within the overall population than owners of more basic mobile phones.”

Not shocking news, eh? Yeah, we didn’t think so. This tidbit from another study by Pew Internet won’t be either but the percentages may surprise you

On Tuesday, we posted an update on the latest features we tossed into our Soapbox Donations tool with its integrations with Salesforce. We also compared ourselves to Scrooge McDuck - favorably, of course. He is a lovable Disney character, after all.

Beyond the additions to Soapbox Donations, we also made some other tweaks and enhancements to the Soapbox platform. As always, we're indebted in that effort to some great clients offering excellent ideas to implement and identifying annoying bugs to exterminate. Thanks to the following folks for their helpful contributions on both fronts:

We are so into money. Buckets of it. Piles of it. All for our nonprofit clients. We’re like Scrooge McDuck about this stuff.

Anything we can do to give them the power and flexibility to get more cash to rock their worlds for the social good, we’re down with. And the enhancements we just rolled into our Soapbox Donations product do just that. Here’s a taste of what they have to offer to amp up online donations strategies, particularly if that strategy uses our Salesforce integration tools:

A few days ago, Jeff Barr in the Amazon Web Services team made an announcement that made us giddy: Simple Email Services (SES) now has a built-in bounce notification service. This seemingly boring announcement gives our Soapbox Mailer for Salesforce service terrific new powers, enabling us to provide you the first and only native Salesforce.com email marketing app that utilizes SES and this great bounce management functionality.

With a little architecture brainstorming provided by Rohan Deshpande on the Amazon SES team, and with the flexibility of the Force.com platform, we were quickly able to implement real-time notifications directly into Soapbox Mailer. This new feature provides our organizations the ability to get critical data to better understand their lists' effectiveness, and enables them to clean and purge their lists as needed.

Earlier this week, we shared how the good folks at the Groundswell Movement are achieving "massive growth" using Soapbox Engage to connect their website to their Salesforce account. One thing we didn't mention is that their primary website runs on WordPress. No fuss, no muss, though, because Soapbox Engage plays well with others.

All that goodness we mentioned about doubling their supporter list, getting thousands of online donations, managing events and offering an online search tool - all integrating in real-time with Salesforce - that is available for any WordPress user.

"Massive growth" with Soapbox Engage

"Soapbox Engage has allowed us to achieve pretty massive growth," said Isaac Luria, Senior Director for Engagement, New Media and Technology.

The Groundswell Movement is a non-profit organization in New York City, sponsored by Auburn Seminary. It was founded on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by a Sikh American family that was exposed to anti-Muslim violence. As a new organization, building their supporter base was vital.

Within two months of launching Soapbox Engage, they doubled their supporter list.

"We have a list of 40,000 supporters now. Soon we'll likely be over 50,000 and could be over 100,000 by the end of the year," said Luria.

A few weeks ago, we happily announced the launch of the new website for Help Abolish Legal Tyranny, or HALT. We mentioned how pleased we were that we could help them abolish their own bit of website tyranny.

Rodd Santomauro, Executive Director of HALT, is pretty pleased, too! "Very, very pleased", in fact:

At PICnet, were not about just moving pixels around to create a website. We're about empowering non-profits to better meet their missions through web technology. So when the good folks over at the Coast Guard Foundation let us know that's exactly what happened as a result of the launch of their new site, we had to do a little jig.

We could have posted a video of that but, since our jig skills leave something to be desired, we figured it would be better to let the Foundation give you the low down in their own words:

We dig the community we work with: smart folks committed to the social good who are seeking innovative ways to bring about positive change as effectively and efficiently as possible. Of course, we know that all the smarts and ingenuity don't get you too far without the funky dollar bill.

We love to see clients dash off the starting line with a new Non-Profit Soapbox site that they can effectively manage on their own to better serve their missions. Meet HALT, the latest Soapbox site to sprint out onto the interwebs.

HALT, or Help Abolish Legal Tyranny, is the nation's largest legal reform organization - a nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest group of more than 20,000 members.