Salsa

Salsa Weekly Highlight: Smart Groups

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:05:00 -0400

(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 what 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, we'll take a look under the Supporter tab at Smart Groups, one of Salsa's many features to help you segment your list.

What's the difference between Smart Groups and regular Groups? Smart Groups are automatically populated by Salsa, freeing you from remembering manual updates.

At 12-hour intervals, Smart Groups empty themselves and repopulate based on the results of a query you've told it to use.

Connect with us!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:59:00 -0400

We're very excited to announce that we connected with our 1000th follower on Twitter today! Thank you so much!

If you haven't already, follow us on Twitter for announcements and updates. You can also "like" us on Facebook.

We're always looking for new ways to organize and engage our user base - so let us know what you think by commenting on our Facebook wall or our Twitter feed. In the near future we plan on organizing meet-ups and tweet-ups so you can connect and share stories with other Salsa/DIA/WFC users.

As always, check out SalsaCommons.org to connect with other users and learn more about how to get the most out of your Salsa experience!

A Note About Outages

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:13:00 -0400

We are extremely sorry for the outage we experienced today, and others over the past week. We know that you rely on our service each and every day and an outage of any duration is not acceptable.

Due to our growth, additional burdens and requirements have been placed on our systems over the past few months. We are working diligently on a significant overhaul of our back-end server and network systems.

We have spent a significant sum in hardware over the past two months alone, and are in the process of installing and migrating to this new gear on a weekly basis. Of course, this process can be rather tricky, and entail unforeseen ramifications that manifest themselves at the most inopportune times. The outages over the past week have all been side affects of the work we're doing to expand capacity while simultaneously increasing redundancy at every point in our system.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience the past week's outages have caused. I assure you that we continue to make every effort possible to prevent these issues, and are committed to getting this right as quickly as possible.

Salsa Weekly Highlight: Using Salsa Built-In Reports

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:43:00 -0400

(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's feature is one that I hope you've been making use of already: Salsa's expanded menus of built-in reports. My favorite thing about these system reports is that you can grab copies for your own headquarters, and customize them to your needs!

Gmail and Hotmail Change How Email is Delivered and How It May Affect Your Organization

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:48:00 -0400

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.

An open model for the future of citizen engagement

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:35:00 -0400

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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Salsa Weekly Updates

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:23:00 -0400

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 ...

Product News/Weekly Tip

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 ...)