Soapbox Engage Blog

With N-TEN's Non-Profit Technology Conference coming up in just one month, we thought you might want a little reminder of PICnet’s shenanigans from NTC 2006 in Seattle.

In the world of CRM systems, we’ve played with them all. Internally, we’re fans of the SugarCRM tool for a variety of reasons, none of which I’ll even try to explain here. Well, I will point out one: SugarCRM 5 finally includes an easy to use module builder (something our friends in the Salesforce.com world have had for a while now).

This is the holy grail of online CRM systems which kept organizations like PICnet in the world of offline databases like FileMaker Pro. With our internal tracking of domain names, databases, pipeline and sales, server configurations, etc, we needed something that could pool all this data into one place.

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point has become the marketing world's leading book on understanding how trends ripple through society. In short, one of the cornerstones of Gladwell's thesis is that highly influential individuals disproportionately affect the buying decisions of others in the community. If marketers can focus their efforts on the influentials, they'll reap the returns.

But what if Gladwell got it wrong? What if his interpretation of Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees of Separation experiment was short sighted, and based on a data set that was too small?

Duncan Watts, a research who now does work for Yahoo Research, was interviewed in Fast Company magazine's February 2008 issue. In his interview, he was able to effectively have me question whether or not these influentials really had any more power than the average Joe and Jane.

More importantly for us at PICnet, we have for a long time focused our discovery process on building personas for highly connected individuals for our clients. The goal is to determine what those highly influential individuals in an organization's community want to be communicated with, and to determine the most effective path to doing so in online communications.

If Watts is right, however, the effects of luck and "right place, right time" might be much more influential than our Influentials.

Kayako is a wonderful support ticketing system that we use at PICnet for all our Soapbox clients. As we get a better picture of the macro effects of our growth, we're starting to realize that getting data out of Kayako is critical for us to understand how and where our clients need help.

As those who use Kayako know, there aren't much of any reporting tools in eSupport product. Actually, there's none. Luckily, Kayako has a well-supported forum community, from which I've been able to pull the following great SQL queries to run some basic reports.

Last year was our building year at PICnet. That's putting it lightly actually. Growing nearly three times in size, with two new offices in New York and San Francisco, the company has morphed into a true bi-costal enterprise (I enjoy using words like "enterprise" liberally in business).

It's important to my business management methodology to follow my mantra of MBWA: managing by walking around. I want to be in each of our offices at least a few days each month, making sure PICnetters have face time with me while also spending time doing partner and business development meetings in our three cities.

I think it's great that other technology companies can have their entire teams working virtually. That's not the way we work at PICnet though, as I'm a true believer that water-cooler time is the place where new ideas are sparked, and that team building needs to happen both online and offline, daily.

That's right folks, you read that headline right: I use Windows Desktop Search. And I love it.

I know, I should be using Google Desktop, with all sorts of Web 2.0 gadgets, widgets, thing-a-ma-bobbers, etc. I've used Google Desktop for a few years actually, but I was finding that in exchange for the 3GB of disk space that it started taking up, the benefits were a little limiting. I wanted to be able to sort my results in a variety of ways, to search things other than just basic Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook contents.

In short, I wanted more control of my desktop search.

I must admit, when it comes to development processes, I'm an old fashioned pseudo waterfall procedure kind of guy. I know what you're thinking: this guy needs to drink the agile programming, extreme programming, pair programming Kool-Aid.

Well, with the help of our development department, I'm in full test-driven development therapy (thanks Chris and Mark). Even better, I'm dragging one of our project managers, Pradeep, along for the ride.

From our friends at Wikipedia: "Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development technique consisting of short iterations where new test cases covering the desired improvement or new functionality are written first, then the production code necessary to pass the tests is implemented, and finally the software is refactored to accommodate changes."

Gulp. Can management and test-driven development live in harmony?

As Non-Profit Soapbox continues to grow in popularity, our hours spent doing invoicing each month continues to grow as well. Our joy of working with QuickBooks seems to decrease proportionally with the swelling number of clients.

Being a company steeped in the Web, I began wondering recently if there's a better way of managing our invoices. Currently, we have to manually use QuickBooks to create invoices and receipts, then PDF them, then email them. This ends up adding up to about 5 hours a month, which I'd rather have spent on new Soapbox innovations.

About 6 months ago I signed us up for Freshbooks, an online invoicing system well accepted by the Web 2.0 world. Freshbooks seems made for people just starting out with invoicing, and those that might not already be using QuickBooks. For instance, QuickBooks is our master accounting records, and where we record active clients. With Freshbooks, it seems like we'd need to duplicate our efforts by posting invoices in both our QuickBooks and Freshbooks.