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On Friday, we enlisted Fozzie Bear to paint a picture of all the great ways you can display your Salesforce data within a website. What if you don't have one website but two? Or twelve? Or two hundred and twelve? What if you're the national headquarters of an affiliate network with fifty affiliates all over the country? Or an international headquarters with affiliates in every major city, borough, hamlet, and village in every country across this fair planet of ours? Tell me: what good is including all that good Salesforce data you've got in one measly, little old site going to do for you? How amazing would it be if you could push all of that data you're looking to share from just one Salesforce instance to not just one website but to every single one of your affiliate sites? Honestly, good gentles, 'tis child's play for Soapbox Engage! Read on! Read on! You’ve got data. It’s nice data. It’s data about people and places and things. It’s members and donors and clients and locations and dues and grants and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!). And all of that lovely data is safely and securely stored in your Salesforce.com account. But you’re a giving, sharing kind of person. You’re not a greedy and selfish and man-sized-safe-in-your-office secretive kind of person. You want to share that data. Not everything, mind you! That would be just self-absorbed foolishness. But you want to share important bits and pieces that will be valuable to your website visitors and beneficial in achieving your mission. The Salesforce.com adoption rate within the non-profit sector continues to grow. To be specific, more than 11,000 organization! With this growth comes a new community of Salesforce consultants focused on helping organizations use these tools effectively. We've sat down with many of these consultants, and listened to their hopes, concerns, and ideas. How can we help organizations use these to their highest benefit? What are ways we can help organizations be more efficient with their data processing? For example, right now it can be time-consuming and sometimes difficult to importing data into Salesforce, especially in real-time from external Web resources. Think donation pages, event registration pages, petitions, etc. In tough economic times, organizations are also feeling a budget pinch, and they're not in a position to invest in custom Web development to connect to their Salesforce instance. Well, have we got a little pain relief for everyone. With our recent release of Soapbox Engage, Salesforce consultants can bolt on ready-to-deploy donation pages, event registration pages, web forms, and even searchable directories...all of which talk to Salesforce in real-time. Even better, consultants are able to keep clients' CFOs happy with extremely affordable services. What makes Soapbox Engage such a good fit for Salesforce consultants? Far too often, non-profits are left on the dull-edge of technology, sacrificing innovation for affordability. At PICnet, we believe the ability to effectively raise funds, organize events, and mobilize supporters should be within the reach of any organization. Organizations shouldn’t have to fundraise to afford the next generation of fundraising software. As a company dedicated to hitting this challenge head-on, we are thrilled to announce the beta release of Soapbox Engage, the first-of-its-kind suite of donation, events, search, and submit tools that leverage the power of Salesforce.com for non-profits. Our goal is to tear down the barriers to entry for organizations that want to more effectively use the Web to collect and expose data from Salesforce. So your ears perked up when you heard the magic words “Salesforce” and “your website”, but now you want to know what exactly this thing can do. Here’s a breakdown of the powerful new features that Soapbox Engage will provide, building an easy but powerful bridge to Salesforce for your organization's data collection and display needs.
A pure accidental techie — I came to work in this industry (believe it or not) through a babysitting job I had after college. One of my favorite things about being a Project Manager is being able to collect and share some of the best free online tools that are available. Since 2006, our robust Non-Profit Soapbox platform has served more than 350 organizations, empowering them with the quality, easy-to-use, flexible, affordable (we could go on...) web tools they need to carry out their missions. Soapbox has gone through several important milestones in its history: 2006: launch of the non-profit community’s very own hosted web platform, Soapbox 1.0, optimized for their specific needs, based on years of best practice captured by PICnetters Technology advances so quickly that sometimes it’s fun to stop and take a look back at how far we’ve come—for the web as a whole and for our beloved Soapbox platform in particular. Here’s a trip down memory lane for the recently upgraded Virginia Water Environment Association (VWEA) website. We’re super thrilled to have grown up alongside VWEA, and even more excited to upgrade them a new site! Phil Penn Gwynn must be feeling like a proud papa penguin! Two of our Non-Profit Soapbox sites took home 2011 Wilmer Shields Rich Gold Awards from the Council on Foundations for their websites! These awards recognize effective communications efforts to increase public awareness of foundations and corporate giving programs. Please put your fins together for The Hitachi Foundation and the Global Fund for Women! 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! Need More Details? 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. |
Greetings! My name is Amber, and I am the newest 
Donations
Events
Petitions
Forms
Shop
Directories