Democracy In Action

This week both Gmail and Hotmail announced forthcoming changes in how they’ll handle email delivery.  While we won’t know the full impact of those changes until they launch (and you better believe we’ll be keeping an eye on them), we can share enough about what we do know  to get you thinking about how you engage your email lists.

It looks like the days of sending email with no “ask” are officially ending.

I was lucky enough to speak at the Salsa Labs Community Conference with Anne Dougherty from Clean Water Action and Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. The title of the panel was "Ready, Set, Action! Translate Online Actions into Offline Results".

Each of us presented a very different perspective on this topic. I discussed the future of citizen engagement and how to get involved in bringing it to fruition. Alan presented his impressive social media strategy for creating offline results, and Anne presented ways to use Salsa to enhance the effectiveness of online campaigns.

Below is a brief overview of my presentation.

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Welcome to the new and improved Salsa Weekly Update - your source for all things Salsa.

Whether you're a developer, a user, a partner or just curious - this all-encompassing update has lots of news you can use. So without further ado ...

Events

Wednesday's events release upgraded the page flow of our events system, and streamlined the events creation process. Bottom line: it's easier:

• to manage your events (attendee status can be updated in bulk, and events that don't require registration can now be created)
• for supporters to sign up (information is carried over better from screen to screen)
• and, for supporters to manage their own distributed events (navigation links added throughout)

(more ...)

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

Ready to bump up the impact of your online actions?

Our friends (and Salsa partners) at New Signature have added an amazing tool to the Salsa Market: Click2Call Actions.

“Make it easy for your supporters to use the power of their voice to advocate for change.  Connect your supporters directly to their legislators via phone - actions stored in Salsa.”

—Click2Call Jalapeno

With the advent of Salsa Market, third-party developers are creating evermore exciting ways of enhancing Salsa to extend your online organizing reach. We've already featured a couple of those tools in this space, like the Change.org "sponsored petition" tool. As the Market develops in the months ahead, you can expect to see plenty more. But we're pretty excited to see others picking up on this, too ... like this fantastic blog post from Josh Cohen about New Signature's Click2Call tool.

With the advent of Salsa Market, the "app"-type features to extend your online organizing reach are starting to get downright exciting.

We've already featured a couple of those tools in this space, like the Change.org "sponsored petition" tool. As the Market develops in the months ahead, you can expect to see plenty more.

But we're pretty excited to see others picking up on this, too ... like this fantastic blog post about New Signature's Click2Call tool. Dozens of organizations have been looking for this kind of feature, enabling you to send email blasts that auto-generate district-targeted constituent phone calls to lawmakers.

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

We've recently released an upgrade to the indispensable Website Management feature unsubscribe pages.

They'll let your organization build intuitive unsubscribe pages that work with any list management strategy, and let people opt out of Salsa Groups, Tags, and/or Chapters.

Is it everyone?

Okay, maybe not quite. (Yet.)

But this highlight video from the 2010 Salsa User Conference captures the vast range of users and uses for our favorite online organizing platform.

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week, I wanted to share a feature that isn't new to Salsa, but might be new to you.

Email A/B Testing just means:

• Sending slightly different versions of your emails to compare performance.

For instance, you might be wondering:

• Will more people open an email with the subject "Please donate now" than "Help us reach our goal"?

Salsa's A/B testing makes it a snap to find the answer.

(Read on for step-by-step instructions.)

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

I've got a great little feature to share with you this week to give your pages more user-friendly web address URLs ... like

Instead of

As of yesterday, you should have started seeing this new feature available in all your Salsa-built pages, in the floating yellow box where you can also switch the page's template.

We've heard from a lot of you that a constant frustration is the lengthy URLs produced by Salsa.  Besides being really difficult to use in emails, they can be quite the eyesore. We heard your concerns and that's why we are releasing the Short URL feature to set your own customized URLs for any webpage.

(Thanks to Ilyse Kazar, technology consultant for NPOs and educational organizations at Adept Digital Evolution, for sharing her thoughts as a participant in the 2010 Salsa Community Conference!)

Tech conferences are for nerdy computer mavens, right? Hundreds of high-I.Q., awkward folks milling about in their propeller beanies, salivating over software and code, eating Twinkies and drinking Jolt, right? Over the course of my tech consulting career (which began with an "IBM clone" that would have been at home in Fred and Wilma's house) I have been to quite a few tech conferences and expos. And in actuality, I have discovered that people who work in technology are a fascinating and diverse and creative lot. I have made solid friendships lasting decades with many colleagues -- who are also involved in everything from making music to helping in Haiti after the earthquake.

So, when I headed to D.C. for my first Salsa conference this summer, the event was slated to be stacked up in my mind against memories of some very well-done, informative and fun "devcons" I had attended in the past, that were populated by an interesting crowd. The bar was set high! And ....

(insert drum roll here....)

In every way, the Salsa Conference of 2010 was the best I have ever attended!

(Read more ...)

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week, online organizing got a little bit easier. Now, you can put the power of the Salsa organizing platform directly in the hands of your supporters.

mySalsa is a cutting-edge platform that wraps all Salsa's core features into an easy-to-use community portal empowering your people to connect with others and to:

• host events
• start groups
• post updates
• fundraise
• ... and more!

Netroots Nation 2010 is this week in Las Vegas and the Salsa Labs team will be there in full force.

Netroots Nation is a gathering of some of the best and brightest minds in the progressive community and we're really excited to take part in discussions about new and emerging trends in organizing and advocacy campaigns.

If you are a Salsa/DIA/WFC user and are going to be in Vegas, make sure you sign up for our Twitter list to more easily connect with other members of the Salsa family.  You can sign up for the list here: 

Salsa Market director - Ali Savino - will be hosting a meet-up for the developers/coder/hacker crowd at Netroots as well.  Details can be found below or RSVP on Facebook.

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

How would your email list look with a few thousand -- maybe tens of thousands -- more names?

This week, I wanted to share an application available in the Salsa Market to help build your list ... one of the core needs of any online program. If you're still unsure whether the Market can help your organization, the change.org application is a great place to start.

Third Thursday is upon us and we're getting ready for an exciting day ahead.

At 4 PM today, Salsa Labs' training specialist Trina Zahller will delve into strategies for analyzing and organizing your support data. Then Royelen Boykie of Food and Water Watch shares her strategies for taking those supporter relationships to the next level! It all happens live at our offices:

Salsa Labs
1700 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington DC 20009
(That's just two blocks up from the north exit of the DuPont Circle metro stop. We're right above the Starbuck's on the corner of Connecticut and R.)

With the Salsa Community Conference in the books like a Dutch defender, it's full steam ahead into the steaming D.C. summer.

If you subscribe to our Events and Trainings newsletter, you already know all about the full slate of Salsa trainings on the docket for July. This, the week of July 12, is a particularly busy one as it hapens to combine our two recurring monthly training events.

"Salsa 101"

New to Salsa, or have a new person on your team? Especially geared towards newer users, a five-day sequence of webinars on the core tools in the software kicks off today with the aptly-named New User Orientation.

Follow that up with:

• Tuesday, July 13: Supporter Management
• Wednesday, July 14: Email
• Thursday, July 15: Signup Pages & Triggers
• Friday, July 16: The Complete Campaign

(more ...)

This is a guest blog post from Anne Dougherty (Clean Water Action).  Anne is a Salsa user superstar and recently received the Hot Tamale Award at our user conference for her organizing work at Clean Water Action.

Tips for getting the most out of what we have right now

While there are a lot of directions online actions can go, I'd like to address some of the things you might want to consider as you're trying to get the most out of the Salsa Actions tool as it exists in 2010.