Soapbox Engage Blog

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:

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.