nptech.info

At PICnet, we dig choice. Choice is good. Choice is especially good when it comes to ways our clients can collect money for donations, membership dues, and event registrations seamlessly on their sites through Soapbox Donations and Soapbox Events.

Choice + money = all sorts of goodness.

That goodness just got a bit gooder for our do-gooder clients with the addition of Braintree Payments as a payment processor option. Now our clients have the choice of PayPal Pro, Authorize.net, or Braintree when it comes to folks swiping their credit cards virtually to support their cause.

Why Braintree? It’s not just for the name which makes us feel smart and earthy every time we say it. They’ve developed quite a rep for being both developer-friendly and customer-friendly. Just check out to what Pascal Finette, Director of Mozilla Labs at Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser you just might be using to read this, had to say about Braintree:

“Braintree is phenomenal – not only do they have a proper payments API (try to find that somewhere else!) and constantly innovate on every aspect of the business, but their team is also redefining what great service looks like. In our terms: A whole lot of Awesome.”

Goodness AND awesomeness. That’s quite a one-two punch – and now it’s available in Soapbox.

Benefit Corporations are no stranger to being ahead of the curve, and that especially true for B Lab’s new website that spotlights these trailblazing organizations. For those of you who haven’t heard the word about Benefit Corporations, they are a “new class” of corporation that are re-imagining the way that business does business in order to affect positive change in the world.

If you’d like to see a list of this growing community of socially responsible businesses, the new BenefitCorp.net website will grant that wish. And given that their Benefit Corp search directory is fed live from B Lab’s CRM database—Salesforce.com— you’ll be able to see the list automagically grow almost before your eyes as more and more organizations join the ranks.

You can also explore B Lab’s other resources such as a directory of attorneys that help organizations pursue Benefit Corp status or a list of third party standards relevant for current Benefit Corps.

These search directories are powered by PICnet’s homegrown Salesforce Search tool which allows you to pull data from any one object in Salesforce to your website, removing the need to update lists in multiple places. With Salesforce Search, your Salesforce instance can act as your database of record for your website to display lists of members, recent donors, pledge signers, even images or files from your Salesforce instance!

Contact us to learn how your website can get in on this love with our Salesforce Search tool.

If you’re not already using Salesforce.com, visit the Salesforce Foundation’s website to learn more about how your organization can get started with this amazing CRM tool. And since it’s donated to 501(c)(3) organizations, and deeply discounted for certified B Corps, there’s no reason to wait!

Visit B Lab’s website to learn more about socially responsible businesses.

Did we mention that PICnet has been a proud B Corp since 2010?

If your non-profit’s website is in dire need of an overhaul, but you’re having trouble getting your decision makers on board, fear not! We have a list of surefire benefits to justify your cause with a clear cut example to boot.

But don’t just take our word for it. PICnet had the pleasure of working with New York-based non-profit, The Bridge, on their handsome new site. Here’s what they said.

“Soapbox was exactly what we were looking for in terms of sophisticated and search friendly design. We are thrilled with the way our new site looks and functions. Thanks to our PICnet team!”  - Ann R. Hyatt, Director of Development & External Relations, The Bridge

What got Ann so excited? First, let’s look at the before and after shots.

Before

After

Quite the improvement, right? But it’s not just the aesthetics that make a great site. Let’s dive deeper.

As an organization dedicated to the incredible task of changing the lives of the most vulnerable–”people with serious mental illness or substance abuse, the homeless, and people with HIV/AIDS”, The Bridge understands the important role that their website plays in 1) providing easy access to resources to those who need it while 2) raising awareness about the transformative power of rehabilitative services which are woefully underfunded.

Migrating to our Non-Profit Soapbox CMS afforded The Bridge a virtual transformation of their own, with the following benefits:

1. improving user accessibility
   The old Bridge site was heavily image based which made pages load at a crawling pace and didn’t allow users to copy useful text and resources easily. The new site is much more intuitive to browse and find the information you need quickly.
2. improving SEO
   Along the same lines, if a site is difficult for users, it’s difficult for Google to crawl as well. The new site opens up a wealth of text-based resources to search engines and will help more of those in need find what they need.
3. easy to use CMS
   The Bridge staff struggled to keep their site populated with fresh, compelling content with their old clunky platform, but now that they have the power of Joomla and Non-Profit Soapbox behind them, they are happy accidental techies.
4. adding blogging and commenting functionality
   With their upgraded CMS, The Bridge is now able to maintain two vibrant blogs (main blog and a program blog) to spark conversation around the issues they care about.
5. leveraging embedded media
   Again, thanks to Non-Profit Soapbox, The Bridge can now easily include embedded media such as YouTube clips and slideshare items like on this page.
6. getting on the social bandwagon
   Following The Bridge on Twitter is as easy as visiting their homepage, thanks to their ever-useful Twitter feed of recent tweets.
7. learning from your audience
   How often do you get a chance to take a step back and reevaluate your website strategy? Take a cue from The Bridge: a redesign is a great opportunity to work with focus groups to get feedback and direction for your new site.
8. capitalizing on the wow factor
   Just look at it! W-O-W!

Now that you’ve got the argument down, get on that Soapbox!

PICnet is proud to be a long-time supporter of NTEN (Non-profit Technology Network), which is why we do our best to keep the NPtech love flowing from coast to coast with our monthly 501 Tech Club happy hours.

I organize the meetings for the DC “Accidental Techies” on the fourth Thursday of every month while my co-worker, Lauren Grau, coordinates the San Francisco NTENers one night each month.  The NTEN Happy Hours are a great way to meet more people in your field, learn something new about non-profit management, and keep up with today’s ever-changing technology. And don’t worry; you don’t have to be an NTEN member to join, so invite your friends!

This week is a very busy one on the PICnet social calendar as both Lauren and I have happy hours. Find details below.

Washington DC NTEN January 2012 Happy Hour

When: Thursday, January 26, 2012

Time: 6:00 pm EST

Where: Science Club – 1136 19th Street, NW Washington, DC

What: This month’s speaker, Andrew Hunt of AGH Strategies, will be talking about solving problems that go beyond technology. As always, we’ll have great appetizers and happy hour specials for all to enjoy!

RSVP here.

San Francisco NTEN January 2012 Happy Hour

When: Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Time: 6:00 pm PST

Where: John Colins – 138 Minna Street (between New Montgomery & Third Streets) San Francisco, CA

What: Melissa Roberts from Free Range Studios will be discussing the usefulness and relevance of mobile apps.

RSVP here.

If you’re in the DC or SF areas, I hope you can join us for these great events – see you there!  If not, check out this list to find your local Tech Club: http://www.nten.org/techclub

We’re doing a bit of work creating user-friendly and affordable engagement tools for non-profits.  Much of this work is connecting our Soapbox services to Salesforce’s Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP).  A goal in our integration is to make it as seamless as possible for organizations to use the NPSP out of the box with Soapbox.

One of the things we’ve documented are the record types utilized by the NPSP.  These record types are important, as we’re able to have our Soapbox service pass event registrations, petitions, donations, and more through Salesforce.  This seemed a little difficult for us to find, and we’ve been seeing some inconsistencies in the creation of record types in the NPSP (I think others have as well), so I thought we’d document what we’ve found.

Trialforce NPSP installation

Opportunity Object

• Donation
• Grant
• Major Gift
• Matching Donation
• Membership

Account Object

• Individual

Manually created install of NPSP

Opportunity Object

• Donation
• Grant
• Major Gift
• Membership

Account Object

• Individual

Have others found similar differences between these NPSP installations?

Ask any economist, and you’ll likely hear the same response:  as markets mature, consolidation tends to occur.  So, while it’s big news, it’s not necessarily surprising to hear today’s announcement that Blackbaud is purchasing Convio.  These two publicly traded corporations have been in the non-profit technology space for a long time, and I congratulate their boards on coming to such an important agreement.

Now, let’s get to the real business at hand:  what can be done now to ensure technology service prices go down, not up, in an era of mega consolidation?  Our answer:  a fresh approach with a dose of healthy competition.

I’ve been hanging around our non-profit sector for many years.  Heck, I still remember walking into Ed Batista and Holly Ross’s N-TEN office back in 2004, complaining about the lack of open source software support in the sector while Ed drew his famous nptech circles on a piece of scratch paper.  I remember going to some of the first events organized by our friends at Aspiration Tech, where the promise of innovative and free (as in “liberty”) technology was the buzz.

Throughout the years, however, it seems to me that prices seem to have remained flat (or worse, gone up).  I think our own Tim Forbes summed up how many organizations feel in his recent blog post “We are the 99%: extending the benefits of nonprofit tech beyond the few“.  The bells and whistles organizations are presented at conferences are always enticing, but when the price tag comes out, you can hear the air of hope sucked out of a room full of budget-strapped non-profit leaders.

Back in 2004, I expected that as companies like GetActive, Kintera, eTapestry, and others were bought, their purchases would represent a market focus on lowering prices and increasing innovation.  Today, I’m not sure that’s what ended up happening.

More importantly, while “mid-market” and “large” organizations might be the targets for NASDAQ traded companies, I see that the vast majority of organizations (most all of them small-to-mid-sized) continue to be under-served.  I expected the reverse to happen.  I figured that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would enter the scene with dramatic fashion, preferably with a lightening bolt or something awe inspiring, and impressively flex a downward force on prices, opening the doors to small organizations whose passions are missions are equally as important as the top 10% of our sector.

Unfortunately, Adam Smith seems to have been busy trying to deal with other sectors’ woes recently.

As the market behemoths merge, a new era of opportunity opens for nimble companies to dive in and fill the gaps left in the marketplace.  With platform-as-a-service offerings growing, new companies no longer need to invest large sums of money into hardware, networking, etc.  Additionally, since new players don’t have a legacy client base to migrate from earlier or conflicting products, they’re able to turn more quickly with the changing winds of the market’s needs.

Since 2001, we’ve been focused on delivering effective and affordable website management tools to the non-profit sector.  We’ve been able to achieve this by growing in a sustainable manner (a business practice we follow with our fellow certified B Corporations), wholly owned by our company’s leadership (not outside investors) and by contributing to and working closely with open source software communities which enables us to lower costs.

In 2012, we’ll continue in that tradition by extending our services to areas in which organizations are looking for affordable options.  We will offer a new product to the non-profit sector that will provide a true choice to small and mid-sized organizations looking for the cornerstones of their fundraising and communications systems.  This offering will work together as a cohesive unit, not as separate puzzle pieces that need to be patched together to work properly.  By doing so, we aim to give organizations an opportunity to have an integrated, 360-degree view of their community engagement.

Today’s Blackbaud-Convio merger news isn’t the catalyst for our next step for non-profits, but it’s certainly a motivator.  It’s a call to action for our sector’s technology providers to continue to pursue more sustainable and affordable solutions, and to promote competition.

I’m excited to be on this journey, and I look forward to fulfilling the goals Grey and I created when we first started PICnet:  every organization, no matter its size, should have access to effective and affordable technology that enable them to more efficiently achieve their missions.

It is startling what technology can do as we begin 2012. The rate at which data can move and systems can be connected is astonishing. The potential for harnessing this to create positive social change is compelling and inspiring.

And then you look at the price tags being charged to leverage all of this fancy, powerful stuff. It can be staggering. It isn’t uncommon for us to attend conferences and sit in rooms with panel discussions showing off a nonprofit’s custom-built solution to integrate their website, constituent relationship management system, email marketing platform, and other communication channels. The screenshots are slick. The crowd is wowed. The mind races with the possibilities for one’s own organization.

Until the price tag is quoted. It’s usually toward the end of the presentation. It’s often mentioned almost as an afterthought.

“We paid $100,000 to a web development firm just for the front end web interface. The CRM setup was separate.”

Or, “we raised $200,000 for this implementation.”

Staggering. And everyone leaves the room feeling as if they live in a two-room shack and just watched an episode of Cribs that highlighted what they can never have. It’s all great and impressive and inspiring – but the real question rolling around in everyone’s head as they hit the hallway to go to the next session is:

“Damn! How in the world could they raise six figures for a web project?!?”

We usually see the 1% on stage at those demonstrations. They’re the big organizations whose names everyone knows. They have crazy amounts of supporters and large piles of cash. Or they are one of the lucky few who landed some angel donor with a broader vision and deeper pockets than most.

Even when we’re not being wowed by price tags for custom build outs at conferences, we’re wowed by price tags for off-the-shelf CRM/web integration solutions that cost an arm and a leg. And with the news today of Blackbaud buying out Convio, we’ll be curious to see if the reduced number of players in the marketplace means that cost is going to go up by the other leg.

We’re not alone in recognizing this. Our good friends over at Big Duck were concerned enough about the trend that they proclaimed that “Just as the middle class in America is disappearing, so too are mid-level websites.” They bemoan the great divide between the haves and the have nots in the nonprofit web world: those who are on stage at conferences or dropping thousands a year on off-the-shelf solutions and the rest who are cobbling together web communications tools with spit and bailing wire.

We never liked spit or bailing wire.

It doesn’t need to be like this. The industry can do better to serve more nonprofits with powerful tools at fair and reasonable prices so more than just the few can take advantage of what is possible.

PICnet has made a start. With our web integrations with Salesforce, nonprofits can accept donations, manage event registrations, run petition campaigns, search and display data from any Salesforce object, and submit data to any Salesforce object all seamlessly from their website – all for a reasonable price.

And at the dawn of 2012, we’re pledging to push even harder this year to innovate tools to make nonprofits more efficient and effective – and to offer them at prices nonprofits can afford.

We are the 99% – and we’re here to serve the 99%.

Bay Area non-profit techies, mark January 18th on your calendars! Our friends at Aspiration have partnered with Community Technology Network to hold a no cost nonprofit technology training at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA on January 18th.

This Nonprofit Technology Teach-In aims to help you learn new techniques and best practices to take advantage of online tools for your work. Aspiration events are famously hands-on, highly interactive and follow a question-driven format.

Together you’ll tackle the following questions:

• How can I write a good email message and send it to thousands of folks?
• How can I track where my nonprofit and issues are being mentioned online?
• How can I use social media to support campaigns and advocacy?
• How can I better organize my online communications?

If you’d like to suggest a topic, contact help@aspirationtech.org

Space is limited, so register today!

Bring your questions and stories for a fun, collaborative day designed to meet your specific nonprofit technology needs. Click here for more information

Our thanks to the Aspiration team for sharing this wonderful opportunity!   Learn more about Aspiration

With many of us still packing up the holiday lights and cleaning up after New Years bashes, we were impressed to see the good folks over at the Nonprofit Marketing Guide arriving into 2012 all bright eyed and bushy tailed with the release of the 2012 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report.

Not a bad way to get a jump on the new year!

A couple of the findings caught our eye. As folks doing web development for nonprofits, we were happy to see organizations rank their website as their most important tool. Job security and all that, you know!

Their website was followed closely in importance by Email Marketing / E-Newsletter. That Iowa-Republican-caucus-like close second is not surprising when you see that 78% of nonprofits say they’ll email supporters at least monthly in 2012.

That’s a lot of emails – and, for anyone who has priced mass email services, those mass emails ain’t cheap. So, again, it’s not surprising that the list of what scares folks when it comes to nonprofit marketing in 2012 includes some big, juicy orange words revolving around having enough resources and funding to pull off all of this marking stuff.

That leads us at PICnet to ponder a simple question for our own nonprofit technology sector:

Can we do better?

As 2012 dawns and more and more nonprofits move away from traditional mailings to engage in regular email marketing campaigns, can our industry innovate to keep pace by developing new, more cost effective ways of delivering those services and do so in ways that more tightly tracks outcomes tied to individual recipients rather than dubious metrics like open rates?

For those lovers of nonprofits who are convinced that technology can supercharge their missions to make more flowers bloom, more hungry folk fed, more truth shine, and more peace reign, we should finish putting away our holiday lights and cleaning up after the New Year’s bashes. There’s a world that needs changing and it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to do it.

Yesterday we launched the new and improved Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS) site. CUCS has been our client since 2008 and has found a new home just in time for the holidays on Soapbox 2.x. With this migration from Soapbox 1.x they are going to be able to take advantage of all of the great features that are now available, including:

• easy-to-use administrative interface
• improved WYSIWYG editor
• slideshow service
• search engine optimization (SEO) benefits, such as search engine friendly URLs
• …and more!

Paul Howard, CUCS’s Associate Director of Training and Consulting Services worked closely with us on this project. He says,

“The thing I am looking forward to the most about our new site is the ability to add slideshows to our website and use customized templates to help set CUCS apart.”

CUCS’s mission is “to end homelessness for as many people as possible and to provide opportunities for low income individuals and families, particularly those living with disabling conditions, to be productive members of the community.” It is great to know that while we can find a new home for their website this year, they are working to find new homes for individuals in the community day in and day out.

With the new year approaching, you may be considering a fresh start for your organization’s website. Updating your design can be a great way to reinvigorate your site and attract more attention to your cause.

PICnet client Drops Fill Buckets (DFB) recently undertook a redesign to kick off their next organizational growth spurt … and the result is stunning! As an organization committed to “empowering individuals to raise money for tangible local and international needs that they personally care about,” their website is a critical piece in the puzzle for their mission. DFB’s site serves as a hub for team fundraising by enabling their organizers to plan events, leverage sponsors, and motivate friends and family to support projects.

Drops Fill Buckets encourages its volunteers to make a visible impact, and in the same vein, their own website needs to have a visible impact of its own! DFB’s brand-new design embraces their unique impact-driven, entrepreneurial approach to making a difference.  Executive Director Addie deHilster shares her thoughts:

“Non-Profit Soapbox really helped us create a new website that not only looks modern, but is a much better statement about who we are as an organization, and what we aspire to be.   Their designer did a great job of taking what we said we wanted and translating it into a great visual concept that’s easy to navigate.   We’ve been getting plenty of compliments on the new site ever since we launched it.”

Explore their site and just try to stay away from that donate button, I dare you.  :) Once you learn about their critical projects to empower youth, comfort sick children, fight AIDS, and clean water you’ll understand how a winning design plus a compelling mission packs a big punch.

It always warms our hearts to see our organizations get the support they deserve.  Earlier today, a new link appeared on the Google.com homepage. “‘Tis the season. Google supports organizations that are changing the world.”

The reason? The Google Foundation announced a $40 million grant allocation to non-profit organizations, including our Soapbox client, Polaris Project, to help tackle important challenges around the world. One of their key areas of focus, “fighting human trafficking and modern-day slavery,” is the cornerstone of the work done by our friends at the Polaris Project.

The $11.5 million for this area is believed to be the largest-ever corporate grant devoted to the advocacy, intervention, and rescue of people being held, forced to work, or provide sex against their will.

“Whether it’s by calling the national human trafficking hotline, sending a letter to their senator, or using online advocacy tools, millions of Americans will be able to use their voices to ensure that ending this problem becomes a top priority,” said Bradley Myles, executive director of Polaris Project.

Congratulations to our friends at the Polaris Project for their terrific efforts!

Google just released some major upgrades to Google Analytics that make it extremely valuable for anyone managing a website. So, if you haven’t logged into your account for a while, or if perhaps you never got around to signing up for one, now is the time to immerse yourself in Google Analytics.

Here are a few things that have changed:

• Real Time Reporting: This means you no longer have to wait around to view how people interacted with your site in the past. Instead, you can see how people are using your site right now. With this feature you can more directly track how changes to your site are affecting the way people are interacting with it. For example, if you add a new homepage banner to your website about your Thanksgiving Food Drive in preparation for your drive being featured on a local radio station, go to GA while they are announcing the food drive and see if people are clicking on the banner during the radio segment. It will help you to learn whether or not the banner was an effective addition to your website.
• Mobile Reporting: Pew Internet, a project of the Pew Research Center, estimates that one third of all American adults are now using smartphones. What this means is that it is becoming more and more critical for your website to be optimized for mobile devices. With GA’s new Mobile Reporting, you can be sure to keep a close eye on how people are interacting with your website via their smartphones. This will also give you more robust information about which mobile devices are most commonly used amongst your audience members. With this data you can work to optimize your site for those devices.
• Flow Visualization: Previously in GA you could read where people went from one page to another on your site. You could see a list of the entrance and exit paths for various pages. Now, this data is being presented in a much easier to digest way, using graphic visualizations of the flow of the visitors on your site. You can actually see where they are going and make educated guesses as to why they are moving through your site in such a way. With a better understanding of the current flow on your site, you can work to develop content and other navigational elements to facilitate the flow of your users to certain areas of your site and push them into taking key targeted actions such as donating or signing up to volunteer.

These are just a few of the new advancements of the free Google Analytics tool. I highly recommend that you login or create an account today. There is no doubt that by utilizing this data your organization will be able to increase the value and efficiency of your website.

As a B Corp, PICnet puts an emphasis on people, environment, and then profits.  We have higher legal standards and must meet comprehensive social and environmental standards.  For many businesses, this school of thinking might be backward, but for B Corps, it’s a part of our vision and goals. There are more than 450 B Corporations in 60 various industries across the United States and Europe.  PICnet was proud to become a B Corp in April of 2010.

So it makes perfect sense that as a B Corp, we support other B Corporations whose similarly-minded business models fit in so perfectly with ours. When I learned about Give Something Back, a fellow B Corporation that offers office supplies at a cheaper rate than the average office supply chain, I jumped at the chance to purchase and help support a fellow B Corp. What I found is that the products were not only much cheaper, but I also received free shipping AND had them delivered next day.

Sounds great so far, right? Here’s the kicker: Give Something Back donates 75% of their profits to their community; that is 75x the national corporate giving average! They’ve been changing the game since 1991 and were one of the founding B Corps.

I would definitely recommend Give Something Back to anyone who’s looking to fill their office with durable supplies while also helping a B Corporation that is a shining example of the positive impact business can have on the world.  Missing your stapler? Call Give Something Back today!

From time to time, non-profits come to us wondering what they can do to improve their search engine standings. We recently came across a great video straight from the horse’s mouth, specifically Matt Cutts of Google, that serves as a great reminder of what is really the secret behind good search results—good websites! Watch this video to see what we mean, but here are a few spoilers:

• speedy sites get higher search rankings
• good looking sites get more love
• well-organized sites make search engines happy
• clear and valuable content can never be underrated

All these items are also what keep your users coming back, so a good rule of thumb is: what’s good for users is good for search engines!

If you would like to explore more accidental techie professional development, here’s another gem for fun: Underscores vs dashes in URLs (Oh, Google, what would we do without you?)

Need a new website that hits all the right search engine buttons? Contact us today to learn more about Non-Profit Soapbox.

Not feeling inspired to add new content to your website? Don’t let a difficult platform get in your way! Our Non-Profit Soapbox CMS was designed for accidental techies like you so that you can leave your troubles behind and focus on what’s important—adding fresh, engaging content for your audience!

But you don’t have to take our word for it.

“The ease of use on the back end, and the great design on the front makes generating the content for us a much more enjoyable task. Because it looks great, and it’s easy to update, I think we’ve been much more proactive in getting fresh content on there, so that’s a huge plus for us.”

This insight is from Matt Clark, Communications Associate at the Coast Guard Foundation who recently launched a stunning new website on our Non-Profit Soapbox platform. The Coast Guard Foundation (CGF) is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing the lives of the men and women of the Coast Guard and their families. You could never tell that CGF is over 40 years old thanks to the gorgeous face-lift courtesy of longtime PICnet partner, Big Duck. But CGF also got an upgrade under the hood with our accidental techie-friendly Soapbox CMS.

We look forward to watching the CGF site grow thanks, in part, to a platform that works for you and doesn’t make you work for it.

Congratulations!

Want a beautiful new site? Contact us or our friends at Big Duck to get started today.

I humbly present the following series of statements leading to a hypothesis for your consideration.

Be it that funders view the essential equation of nonprofit life thusly:

And said funders usually hold to the principle that:

Ergo:

If the equation is altered by introducing Salesforce and Salesforce represents a set of variables holding program-related data which is integrated with said website such that program-related data can be displayed, added to, or edited on said website so that it follows that:

Ergo:

And, given that Soapbox is a website:

Or, to simplify:

Ergo, for this and so many other reasons:

Penny for your thoughts

Have a counterpoint? A story which supports the hypothesis? A compelling test case that could offer evidence for or against? Share your thoughts in a comment here or reach out to us! Let’s move from theory to practice!

As some of you know, each month I run the NTEN (bringing together Non-Profits and technology) DC Happy Hour, and this month was no different. Last night we had our monthly happy hour at James Hoban’s Irish Pub. It was a great event that included fabulous munchies, drink specials, and of course, our speaker series!

Tim Forbes, PICnet’s Director of Client Services, spoke about how we can get non-profits  talking about what they need from their CRM tools. He also posed some very interesting questions that definitely got me thinking about where CRM services should REALLY be housed in the budgetary process (overhead costs versus programming costs – the latter of which might allow more non-profits money for CRM tools). Many thanks to Tim for being our speaker and giving us so much to discuss!

Our next happy hour will be on Thursday, December 1, 2011. More details to follow, so stayed tuned to our Facebook group and list serv.

We shared this week and last about tools in Soapbox Engage that allow you to display data from your Salesforce account. You can share all sorts of information you’ve got socked away in all sorts of compelling ways – either on one site or across an entire network of sites. With Soapbox Engage, Salesforce isn’t just your data repository, it’s your megaphone. And oh, what a megaphone it is!

But you’re not interested in simply droning on and on and on to your visitors, incessantly talking and never listening. You want to hear from them. You want them to contact you or sign petitions or submit job applications or apply for grants or do hundreds of other things that require communication back to your organization.

With Soapbox Engage and its Salesforce Submit tool, you can collect that information – and save it directly to any single standard or custom object in Salesforce. Customize the placement of the fields, alter the field labels or hide the labels altogether, add text, images, and even videos around the form fields to give further context for your visitors and add a little sizzle. And you can do all of it without writing a stick of code.

What’s more, if the Salesforce object to which you are sending the submission has Notes & Attachments enabled, you can allow visitors to upload a file or files. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Let visitors upload an image! A PDF may have a thousand words. Give them the ability to include one with their submission. Again, all without writing a stick, a lick, or a line of code.

Salesforce Submit file upload: One field, big punch

Care to see an example?

I’ll warn you. It’s an unassuming little fighter that, pound for pound, packs a bigger punch than any other single field you might come across. It’s the Manny Pacquiao of the online form world – a stone cold knockout. With it, you can set permitted file types and a maximum file size. You can even add multiple file upload fields to a single form so you’re not limited to only one image or document that a visitor can post.

Salesforce Submit file upload: One field in a Contact Us form context

One picture not enough? How about an example of Salesforce Submit file upload in action?

For PICnet’s own Contact Us form, we wanted to give visitors the opportunity to upload a request for proposal (RFP) so we can learn more about what they’re after. This form pushes the responses and the form directly into our Salesforce account so we can be as efficient as possible in onboarding and responding to inquiries.

Want to punch above your organization’s weight with Salesforce Submit on Soapbox Engage? Sign-up today for our limited free beta period (October – November 2011) or view our Soapbox Engage website for more information.

Already a Soapbox client with Salesforce in your ring? Now that’s some potential, baby! Hit us up and, as your corner man, we’ll coach you in how you can use the right cross that is Salesforce Submit to not just get new data from visitors but allow logged in users to ease your burden of updating data by allowing them to edit their own contact information already in Salesforce. Now that’s a one-two punch!

As a certified B Corporation, socially conscious business practices run deep in our DNA.  We believe that companies can be even more successful by looking beyond their bottom-line when delivering services and creating products. More businesses should take into account their impact on the planet, their people, and their customers.  That’s why we’re excited to be part of the Hitachi Foundation’s 2011 Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs Program.

The program, “identifies and supports inspiring young entrepreneurs who are operating businesses that create greater economic opportunity and help to improve the lives of low-wealth individuals in America.”   At PICnet, we’ve enjoyed helping this next generation of entrepreneurs better understand how to more effectively utilize the Web to spread their brand and ideals, while also reaching new customers.

There’s a lot to be learned from these socially responsible entrepreneurs, and tonight, we’ll celebrating their success in Washington, DC, along with our friends from the class of 2010…like Back to the Roots.

Thanks to PICnetters Amber and Tim for leading forward on the effort to analyze these entrepreneurs’ websites, and provide them tips to be more effective.  Congratulations to the 2011 class of Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs!