Democracy In Action

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.

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

Greetings!

Welcome back (after our Community Conference hiatus) to 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.

Things have been anything but quiet hereabouts, and we're excited to kick off July with a raft of new upgrades to the Salsa Events tool.

Now your events include:

• Automatic promotion from the waitlist when space becomes available on an unpaid event
• "Cancel registration" functionality through registrants' profile managers
• Optional minimum fees for events accepting arbitrary payments

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're among the several hundred we saw at the 2010 Salsa Community Conference in Washington DC.

If you did make it, we thank you!

Hopefully, you soaked as much learning and enjoyment out of the two days as we did. We're continually amazed by our community of users and partners, but there's nothing like having them all in a room together, and enjoyed case studies, best practices, margaritas, and highlights like ...

The 2010 Salsa Community Conference is less than 24 hours away and we can't wait!

We're gathering a wonderful group of nearly 300 attendees made up of Salsa users, strategists, partners and techies for two days to talk about all things Salsa.

If you can't make the conference in person - don't worry.  We'll be streaming it live through our UStream channel here.

You can also follow the action on Twitter through our @salsalabs account and the hashtag #salsa10.

For those of you attending the conference, we've set up a unique way for you to share your experiences with others through our Flickr page.  Simply email any photos you take from your mobile device to the email address sun68small2twitter@photos.flickr.com.  Make sure to put a description of the photo in the subject line and add "#salsa10".  These photos will be immediately uploaded to our public photo site and shared through our Twitter feed.

We've got two days jam-packed with create panels and brilliant strategists, but of course we also have a Salsa Fiesta planned for Thursday night as well.  Hope to see you there!

Today we are excited to announce the official launch of mySalsa - our newest tool to make online organizing easier. 

mySalsa is a social network for your supporters.  The tool wraps all of Salsa’s core features into an easy to use community portal that empowers people to get active by quickly connecting with others who share the same passion and interests.  Through this, supporters can host events, start groups, post updates, and even fundraise.

Best of all, it doesn’t replace other social networks where people are already connecting and organizing – mySalsa is a compliment to existing communities.  Think of it as a hub where your supporters can connect and organize while at the same time pushing out that activity to their other social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

This feature has been in the works for a while and we are excited that the Humane Society of the United States and Jerry Brown for Governor campaign in California are already up and running and organizing their supporters like never before.

Check out the screenshot and video demo and see for yourself how exciting the new mySalsa can be:

(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 been upgrading everyone's Website Features section for the past two months. What better way to round off the process than with the one feature that ties them all together?

(Details after the jump)

Step 1: Come to DC for our user conference on June 24-25.

Step 2: Join me on the 25th for a brown bag Friday Fiesta.

Step 3: Try to stifle your laughter as I spill food all over myself.

I watch so many great questions and especially great answers from members come in through the forum each week. I've invited Stephen Davis (of Transportation for America and totally helpful Commons contributor) to join Adam (our Community Manager), me, and whoever else wants to participate in a discussion about our favorite parts of Salsa Commons and a wish list for the future. If you receive my weekly "Friday Fiesta" emails, you know I'm good at rambling and eating. Please consider witnessing both in person on Friday, June 25 at 1:15 p.m.

(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.

Everyone here is busily gearing up for the 2010 Salsa Community Conference later this month, but that hasn't stopped us continuing our user interface updates in the "Website Management" features. This week, it's Directories' turn for a makeover.

Thumbs up to you too, Darcy.

A late addition (too late to make the monthly "upcoming trainings and events" newsletter, which you can sign up for here) to our June events calendar that you won't want to miss:

List-Building Strategy
Tuesday, June 22, 3 pm Eastern
With consultant Matt Holland, formerly of TrueMajority

Learn how you can build your list through cross-promotions with other groups. We'll take a look at how other groups have succesfully grown their lists through this easy, yet underutilized strategy. Register Now >>

(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.

To welcome you back from Memorial Day weekend, we've rolled out a user interface update to another one of our "Website Management" features: Thank-You Pages.