Action for Healthy Kids faced a common dilemma at the core of every nonprofit: how to gauge impact. Specifically, as a nonprofit mobilizing thousands of volunteers to catalyze change in schools across the nation, how could they know how many schools they were touching? In Soapbox Engage and Salesforce.com, Action for Healthy Kids found their answer: “We purchased a list of 130,000 schools across the country and uploaded it to Salesforce.com,” explained Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “We then directed users to our website where they could search for the school with which they are affiliated by utilizing the Soapbox Engage Salesforce search tool.” When Action for Healthy Kids elected to build their new website with Soapbox Engage, they chose more than just a great looking, mobile-friendly website that was easy to manage and useful for event registrations. They adopted a powerful platform integrating with Salesforce.com in ways that have transformed core business processes. “The process for applying for our grants has completely changed as a result of Engage,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “It was a painful, painful thing before. We’d have to send people to Survey Monkey and dowload responses in an Excel file.” Action for Healthy Kids has chapters across the country. Each of these chapters has events for which they manage online reservations. “In the past, we had the state chapters using their own event tools, like EventBrite. Sometimes those names would get into our system and sometimes they wouldn’t,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “For one of our bigger events, we would have hundreds of registrations. When you think about all of those Excel files that would need to be individually configured and sent to the data administrator for clean up and import...it has required hours and hours of time.” Two weeks ago, we highlighted Global Fund for Women, a leader in advancing the rights of women and girls worldwide, and its efforts to mobilize supporters around the globe with Soapbox Petitions and Salesforce. This campaign on behalf of survivors of rape in conflict areas such as eastern Congo and Syria garnered thousands of signatures in just days. As of this afternoon, more than 9,100 supporters have signed their petition. What's more, the overwhelming percentage of these supporters are new to Global Fund for Women: When Action for Healthy Kids chose to move from Convio Luminate to Soapbox Engage and the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Starter Pack, the money saved in recurring monthly fees was enough fund a full website redesign with change to spare. The redesign was far more than a facelift or color refresh. It facilitated a fundamental shift in the online marketing presence of the organization and connects with their audience in entirely new, more mission-focused ways. “We weren’t mobile-friendly. That was an obvious need that aligned with our goal of making a more modern website,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “We really wanted to speak to a consumer audience and make it more visual. We were very copy-heavy and we wanted to communicate through images rather than text.” The desire to speak more effectively to a consumer audience was rooted in both the traditional strengths and perceived opportunities of the organization: We noted in Friday's post World Cup, soccer strategy, and nonprofit success with Salesforce that one powerful way of fostering said nonprofit success with Salesforce is educating nonprofit Salesforce administrators to do for themselves. It just so happens that the Salesforce.com Foundation has two great ways for nonprofits to tool up, and they are free! For those watching the World Cup, it's obvious to see key differences between futbol on the world stage and football of the more provincial American style. The latter is a start and stop affair where huddles occur before every play with each player told where to run, where block, what to do. Much of the time, the strategy is to instruct the team in a way that applies the most force at a given point on the field to gain advantage over the opponent. Conformity to the plan and expert execution is of primary importance. Individual invention, save in very small measure, is of little concern. The team is a machine. The player a cog. Futbol, on the other hand, is an entirely different affair. There are no huddles. There are very few plays. There is an overarching strategy but it is left to small groups of individual players to orchestrate the execution of that strategy moment-by-moment by responding to their particular situation at a particular time in a particular way. Transformations that radically improve a nonprofit’s ability to meet its mission can often happen in unexpected ways. Just ask Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids: “We didn’t have a desire to redesign our website. We just wanted to move over our existing site from Convio Luminate to a new platform,” said Moss. “You almost had to be an expert with Convio to do anything with our previous system. That was no good for us.” Nonprofit marketer, Soapbox Engage just made your brain a lot mightier! Let's say you've got a campaign for which you're hoping to drive traffic to your website and capture conversions. In other words, you're trying to get folks to DO something once they hit your website: Give you money, buy some swag, register for an event. You get the idea. You're tweeting and Facebooking and blogging and all around shouting about it. But how do you know which of those efforts are producing the best results? Or no results? Global Fund for Women, a leader in advancing the rights of women and girls worldwide, is using Soapbox Petitions to mobilize thousands of supporters around the globe on behalf of survivors of rape in conflict areas such as eastern Congo and Syria. Soapbox Petitions, the latest app in the Soapbox Engage online engagement platform, provides real-time integration with Salesforce for the capturing of supporter data and a mobile-friendly user experience to facilitate action on any device. Among the international soccer talent that much of the planet is obsessively following with each dribble, pass, and shot of the World Cup stands a 5'7" Argentine who many consider the best player of his generation, if not of all-time. Here are three traits that make Lionel Messi superb, and that the best nonprofits share with him. Let's talk numbers, shall we? To start, let's grab the number 1.92. 1.92 is the number of times more likely someone signing an online petition is to donate to a similar cause after signing. This was quantified by researchers Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh in their study Does Slacktivism Hurt Activism?: The Effects of Moral Balancing and Consistency in Online Activism. So, I sign your online petition, I am then almost twice as likely as someone who didn't sign that petition to give money to a cause that is similar to yours. Notice that didn't read "give money to your organization". Mark that. It'll be on the quiz later. The researchers also found that I'm more likely to take other actions in support of similar causes after signing your petition, provided those actions don't cost me much. A great example: signing another online petition. Soapbox Shop offers nonprofits ecommerce tools that integrate with Salesforce. Sell widgets or wares, subscriptions or swag, memberships or matchsticks, and have transaction and order data saved directly to Salesforce. What's more, using our user integration add on, you can restrict what products and price points can be selected by visitors according to login status, membership level, and more! |