Salsa

Salsa, the Golden Lasso

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:01:48 -0400

The Salsa communications platform notched an off-year election win by powering the victorious "campaign" of Wonder Woman for DC Mayor at the New Organizing Institute's bootcamp. Congratulations to Princess Diana of Themyscira and the latest addition to her arsenal: the Salsa toolkit.

(Full disclosure: We had two irons in this fire, since one of our staffers also attended NOI and was placed on a non-Salsa team for obvious reasons. As one of our mutual colleagues put it in the inevitable internal email: "Sorry Victoria, you just weren't provided with the tools you needed to run the most successful campaign.")

In less fictional campaigning, Colin at e.politics announces deployment of a new Drupal-built site with Salsa as the CRM infrastructure: International Biochar Initiative. Always a treat to get a little glimpse inside the process, and for quite a cool organization.

Day 6 at NOI Bootcamp

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:54:00 -0400

It's day 6 at NOI's Bootcamp and I'm sitting here with my team (Spider-Man) formulating our plan to get the most people to vote Spider-Man for Mayor in NOI's online election tomorrow. It may or may not involve a online radio show and asking supporters to don Spider-man masks on their walk to work in the morning....

I'm sure the Salsa community must be wondering, "What in the world does a mock mayoral election involving superhero characters have to do with the progressive movement?"

LOTS. This mock campaign was set up by the New Organizing Institute, as part of a week long seminar designed to train the next generation of online organizers in the progressive movement. For the past week, 60 participants from all over the map have been learning a host of online organizing skills from professionals and leaders in the progressive movement. I know I've gained great insight into the details that go into the work our members do on a daily basis. Much respect!

In addition to a jam packed schedule of speakers, each team has been working around the clock on their mock campaigns, applying all the knowledge they've learned to get the most people on their email lists, click through to their site, and commit to voting for their candidate in the online election this Friday.

The week started out with building a website and has progressed to building email lists and communicating our campaign message with the help of awesome online tools like SALSA (Note: both Wonderwoman,and Cyborg are using Salsa). I'll be interviewing their teams on their Salsa user experience tomorrow, so stay tuned for that post.

And it's paid off! Each of these campaigns is getting an unprecedented amount of hits on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, the list goes on. To read some of the buzz, check out all of NOI's Blog.

What is really driving the energy level and the quality of work the bootcampers are producing is participation from the progressive community and beyond! Getting feedback from professionals in the field about the emails we're sending, the websites we've built, and the whole process has been incredibly valuable and much appreciated.

I strongly encourage everyone to participate in the online election tomorrow. Check out all the candidates here, and vote tomorrow!

Till next time Salsa users!

Victoria Ruan

Authorize.net user? You may have missed some donations.

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:20:48 -0400

Authorize.net's data center was down for several hours Friday and into Saturday morning -- not a Salsa-related issue in any way. Anyone using an authorize.net merchant gateway account would have been unable to process transactions during that time; fortunately a Friday heading into (or part of) a three-day weekend in the middle of summer is probably about the least transaction-heavy window of the year. But every gift counts, especially in times like this.

Users should check both their Salsa headquarters and authorize.net accounts for gift history on Friday and early Saturday, but anyone with ongoing campaigns who might have reason to have expected significant donation traffic during that time might want to consider more proactive steps to communicate to supporters.

Heck, view it as an opportunity: it's force majeure, and an excuse to re-ask.

Users of any other merchant gateway, including the DemocracyInAction default (a PayPal Payflow Pro gateway) have nothing to worry about at all.

Local Campaigns After Obama: Catch Wired for Change's PdF Forum Today

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:07:12 -0400

At this afternoon's 2 o'clock breakout session at the Personal Democracy Forum (I'm sorry, I can't help but find that title oxymoronic), catch Wired for Change's Jim Walsh, the brains behind DLCCWeb. He'll be joined by the likes of Colin Delany of epolitics.com and Clay Haynes of Catalist (the voter file that plugs into Salsa).

Here's what they're talking about:

More and more candidates are taking their campaigns online, but technical and strategic know-how remain a major hurdle to turning online support into real world results. Join a conversation on the future of online campaigns at the local level, how using data effectively is key to winning, and how organizing tools are changing to reflect the new realities.

And April isn't even close to 40

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:10:00 -0400

Our very own April Pedersen, co-founder of DemocracyInAction and of Wired For Change has been honored as one of the New Leaders Council's "40 Under 40" -- "a diverse group of young leaders ... who exemplify the spirit of progressive political entrepreneurship."

I've had the privilege of working with April since DemocracyInAction's salad days. It's well-deserved recognition for someone with a rare combination of energy, vision and brilliance.

(Congratulations as well to her fellow-honoree Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a DIA member organization.)

Anyone in D.C. who wants to help April (and a few of her staff) celebrate, roll out to the awards celebration at Chi Cha Lounge tonight.

(Yes, that award registration page is another Salsa link. The New Leaders Council is not just the extoller of April Pedersen and DemocracyInAction: it's also a client.)

E-xemplar: We Want The Public Option

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:37:54 -0400

Great stuff happens when you mix a tool kit like Salsa with a creative campaign concept.

Case in point: WeWantThePublicOption.com

This custom-built petition page offers signers the prospect of their name appearing on an advertisement that will air in the D.C. area in favor of the public option. It's a great way to show impact from an online petition as well as recognize the activists that sign it. And as you can see, it's clearly all about the cause -- not the sponsoring organization, which is practically invisible on the page.

So, how would one build a page like this? On the technical side, they've used our robust API to create a custom form that populates signers into particular groups. This does require working at the level of the code, but it's nothing more complex than HTML, The same process could just as easily be used to register people for Salsa events, apply Salsa tags, or create any other kind of headquarters data. While they could have hosted this type of page themselves, they've chosen to place it on a Salsa content page so that we pay the bandwidth freight when they get picked up by BoingBoing. Either way is fine by us.

The overall layout and design of the page itself, of course, are wholly custom jobs that Salsa doesn't directly facilitate. Once you've got a design, however, it's a simple matter of including the HTML in the layout of thecustom page.

Technology in politics: Obama deploys health care database

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:27:38 -0400

It's no secret that the Obama campaign-cum-administration has been forward-thinking in its use of technology.

Today, the president's Organizing for America online operation is set to deploy a "health care story bank" -- "perhaps the most ambitious test case yet determining whether the technological apparatus that fueled Obama’s campaign can succeed in driving Obama’s governing agenda."

Thousands of personal stories of the health care crisis that have been collected online will be available for lookup by state and congressional district, the better to whip votes.

It's an impressive technological undertaking in obvious service to the old maxim that should be near and dear to every web communicator: lead with the heart and not the head.

The health care discussion slides easily into wonkishness, but the insurance industry bought the past 15 years of parasitism withsome personal storytelling of its own.

(n.b. -- health insurance at $3200 a year is the nightmare scenario in the Harry and Louise ads. In inflation-adjusted terms, that's around $4700 now, which is exactly what the average individual premium runs nowadays. Thank god we were saved from the big government plan.)

The fact that this kind of bad-faith drivel won a serious policy discussion would have to suggest the possibility that when the rubber hits the road, there was more to the legislative sausage-making thanstorytime. Like, millions and millions of dollars in lobbying by a massively entrenched economic sector. And a fainthearted reformist proposal where boldness was demanded.

Much love to databases, but those seem like higher cards in the game.

Apart from efficacy and traction, it'll be interesting to see how the collateral issues play with this toy: privacy (inevitably some stories' details will be enough to track down the authors), authority (some will be false, exaggerated, unreliable, or merely susceptible to counter-narratives), gamesmanship ("troll" stories of varying degrees of sophistication will be submitted;how will they be policed, and how will those that get through be used?). But nobody's ever used a tool quite like this, and any variable that puts focus on the individual victims of health care rather than Max Baucus is a welcome one.

One way or the other it should be worth the poking and prodding when it launches later today. After that ... who knows?

Links for 2009-04-08 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Tweet Quality
As Twitter becomes more and more popular, the quality of tweets (Twitter updates) seems to be taking a dive.
Propaganda.com - NYTimes.com
Governments have honed their Internet strategies beyond censorship with subtle (and harder to detect) ways of controlling dissent, often by planting their own messages on the Web and presenting them as independent opinion.
27 Things To Do Before a Conference
Things We've Pretty Much Established...
... in the nonprofit sector. So write a report on something else.

Links for 2009-03-28 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

How to spot a Twitter user with a ‘Fake’ Follower Count
simply by following as many people as possible and un-following anybody who did not follow back.

Links for 2009-03-26 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Obama turns to Web to bypass news media
"In both cases the questioners are just props — or, in some cases, foils — for the star, Obama, to deliver his message. But in the latter case, they get to self-nominate instead of be selected by elites."

Links for 2009-02-19 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 PST

Five Steps to Twitter Success

Links for 2009-02-18 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 PST

Keywords and data mining
Keywords are the bedrock of search marketing.

Links for 2009-02-17 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 PST

The GOP, Atwitter About the Digital Possibilities
"What an exciting time to be a Republican."

Links for 2009-02-11 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:00:00 PST

10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
A thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook.