Soapbox Engage Blog

This has been an incredible year at PICnet. I mean, if you're going to take a wild ride, what better way to start it off than by having the US economy nearly collapse? I've been humbled by the dedicated work of our PICnetters, clients, and partners that made it possible for PICnet to weather these tough storms.

So before we all take off to our Thanksgiving gatherings with friends and family, filling ourselves with turkey or tofu, I wanted to take an opportunity to share my thanks to those that have helped keep the PICnet flag flying high in 2009.

We're excited to announce the availability of our J!Salesforce 1.0 release, connecting Joomla with Salesforce.com!  Even better, for a limited-time, new Soapbox clients (non-profits and socially responsible businesses) can receive J!Salesforce for FREE!

With J!Salesforce, organizations and businesses using the powerful Salesforce.com CRM can now seamlessly share data with the Joomla CMS.

This has been a long and winding road, but we're proud of the new suite of extensions, and look forward to delivering them to the world.  This release of J!Salesforce 1.0 is currently available to new and current Non-Profit Soapbox organizations and businesses.  Sign-up now!

Key Features

This new suite of tools includes our first step in strong integration of Joomla and Salesforce.com, including:

• connectivity between Joomla and the Contacts object in Salesforce.com
• Joomla user registration with additional custom fields that auto-populate a corresponding Salesforce.com new contact
• profile updating syncing with Salesforce.com
• search directory extension, providing a searchable interface of your Contacts object from Salesforce.com through your Joomla Web site (especially useful for membership directories)
• a user-friendly, customizable and templateable search form, results page, and detailed view page for Salesforce.com Contact records in Joomla

This is just the beginning!  Our vision for version 2.0 includes:

It's about time that I gave another update on some of my travels to spread the word about PICnet, Joomla! and technology. Over the next few weeks you'll see installments from my trips to South Africa, Brazil, Mongolia, New York, and more. The key theme? Engaging with Joomla! communities around the world to share our experiences, lessons learned and latest innovations and vision to create a better product for the user - that may be you!

August 13-19, 2009 - Cape Town, South Africa

I'll begin with my trip to Cape Town, South Africa for their Joomla!Day in August. Among the audience at this conference were Joomla! users and people interested in using it, NGOs, local universities and small businesses. The day before the event there was a training day where I had the opportunity to work with 20 individuals from the community (ex. Food Bank of South Africa) to give them hands on instructions and lessons about using Joomla!.

American Cancer Society of California does great work on one of the most vital issues of our day. To fund this critical effort, they run a network of 40 Discovery Shops that help support the fight against cancer through the sale of high quality, gently used, donated merchandise for men, women and children.

When they came to us asking if we could help create an individual home on the internet for each and every one of these Discovery Shops, we had just one question:

When do we start?

By leveraging the power of Non-Profit Soapbox and crafting a common template for consistent branding across the network, we built 40 sites to promote each individual shop - all efficiently and easily for not much more than the cost of a single site.

No fuss. No muss. Just a high quality network of easy to manage sites to further an important mission. But don't take our word for it. Hear it straight from Steven Wirt, Director of Online and Internal Communications for the American Cancer Society of California:

"I’ve been very impressed and pleased with Non-Profit Soapbox. Wrangling 40 web sites has been a seamless, pain-free experience."

Since 1978, the Center for the Childcare Workforce (CCW) has served as the leading national organization in the call for improving childcare jobs. A program of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), CCW's mission is to improve the quality of child care by upgrading the compensation, working conditions and training opportunities for child care teachers and family child care providers.

Every year on May 1st, CCW and AFT promote recognition of Worthy Wage Day by organizing a variety of activities to recognize and honor the dedication of early childhood educators and staff and to draw attention to their low wages and minimal benefits. This national day of awareness is just one of the many lasting effects of the Worthy Wage Campaign that CCW organized from 1991-1999.

In addition to some of the work we do for clients like site redesigns, upgrades, migrations to Non-Profit Soapbox or Joomla and custom applications, we also like finding cool tools for our clients and partners to use in whatever way works best for them. We've written about website, databases, applications, webinars, conferences and more in the past. Today's cool tool is a combination of many resources - Google. Oh, just Google? you might be thinking. Well, duh, we use Google Docs and Gmail and Google Calendar.

But hold on, don't click away yet. You might use some of Google's basic features, but have you really looked into what they do for non-profits? Read on a little more and you'll see some of the great resources at your fingertips - all through Google.