For any object in Salesforce with valid U.S address fields, you can now add a geo search to a Salesforce Search form. This allows visitors to drop in a zip code and a distance in miles or kilometers, click search, and see what locations in your Salesforce data fall within that geographic radius. The results can display an inset map of that location and tell the visitor how far from the given zip code the location falls.

Why would you care to do this? For as many reasons as there are points on a map, my intrepid explorer! As inspiration for this little journey, think store locator tool, or service location finder, or a tool for finding member organizations that just passed Geography class, or a search tool for funded projects across the country that Dora the Explorer would be proud of.

Interested in giving your website a good sense of direction when it comes to your Salesforce data? Talk to us. We’re happy to serve as your Lewis and Clark for exploring a whole new world of possibility.

Our first happy hour was on Tuesday night right here at our Dupont Circle office. We partnered with SBNOW in inviting their members to mingle and munch on some snacks and drinks while listening to our fearless CEO, Ryan Ozimek, discuss how technology can help businesses become more sustainable.  This correlates directly to SBNOW’s mission of transforming “the ways businesses appraise, engage, and enhance human, ecological, and financial resources in order to make the national capital region a better place to live, work, visit, and do business.” Thanks to all who made that event possible and attended!

This week’s second happy hour happens tonight at 6 pm at Madam’s Organ in Adams Morgan. NTEN, a group I’ve been coordinating events with for a year and a half, is partnering with Community of Hope for a Happy Hour of Hope. Madam’s Organ is having drink specials, I will be ordering some appetizers for our attendees, and best yet – a portion of all proceeds will go toward Community of Hope! Didn’t register? No problem – there’s still time, so do so here.

Rodd Santomauro, Executive Director of HALT, is pretty pleased, too! “Very, very pleased”, in fact:

“Our organization needed a new state of the art website that could provide a lot of information, yet not overwhelm the viewer.  Since our previous website was over a decade old, with more than a thousand pages of information on it, we knew we needed a company that would be patient with us, and take the time needed to do the job correctly.  After interviewing several website companies over the course of many months and doing our due diligence, we kept coming back to PICnet.  Not only were they the most inexpensive vendor by at least 50%, they also offered the most relevant useful options and services for us.  I was amazed at the amount of time they took with us.  We had almost weekly teleconferences with the staff at PICnet for many months, giving input where needed, as we watched our new website be developed.  We are very, very pleased with the final product.”

It was our pleasure to please you, HALT – and our pleasure to continue partnering with you as you get the most out of your new state of the art Non-Profit Soapbox site!

We could have posted a video of that but, since our jig skills leave something to be desired, we figured it would be better to let the Foundation give you the low down in their own words:

Last year, we decided to fully overhaul our website, coastguardfoundation.org. We knew that our mission — helping the men and women of the U.S. Coast Guard and their families — was important, but our online presence needed improvement.

Our old site was difficult to update, sorely lacking interactive features and was generally unappealing. So in conjunction with nonprofit technology consultants Big Duck and PICnet, we embarked on a nearly year-long project to transform our website into something modern, engaging and more user-friendly.

The redesigned website has delivered results already. We know from looking at the metrics, traffic to the site and user engagement has improved. But the statistics only tell part of the story. We’re attracting attention from national sponsors like The Weather Channel, Girl Scouts and Huggies. Our website now reflects who we are, a national nonprofit with reach and scope across the country.

The people we serve are everywhere, and now with the new site, we’re able to reflect that online. We’ve long sought to engage better with the people who make up our community, and the redesigned PICnet site allowed us to do just that with their commenting system, which lets our stakeholders be a central part of the conversation.

In addition to the increased functionality of the site, our redesign improved the aesthetics of our mission and message, as well. Our president, Anne Brengle, was on the West Coast recently on donor visits. Due to a delayed flight she wasn’t able to meet with a prospective major prospect. Just hours after their meeting was supposed to take place, Anne received a call from the donor.

“He said, ‘I just looked at your website. I have all the information I need to make a donation,’” Anne said. The result was a $25,000 gift to one of the Coast Guard Foundation’s scholarship funds.

As an organization, we’re convinced that if we were still operating our old site, this type of donation would have never happened. Non-Profit Soapbox has allowed us to have a platform that presents our organization’s message in a powerful and compelling way online. Our website serves as the face of our organization, and we are confident that we’re presenting the Coast Guard Foundation in our best light thanks to PICnet.

Congrats on the success! May the website continue to open doors as you work to serve the men and women of the Coast Guard and their families!

“Nonprofits need to be mindful of seeking balance among their funding sources and moving toward more robust fundraising management,” she adds. “Individual charitable giving should be a key element of the funding equation for nonprofits.”

To be sure, Ms. Reddrick is right. And just as sure as she’s right, her comments will not surprise any Executive Director or Development Director. All will readily admit that they want more diversified sources for that funky dollar bill regardless of their current funding mix.

The issue isn’t lack of will or understanding of the value of a diversified funding base. More often than not, it comes down to how many tick tocks are on the clock and the overall capacity an organization has to make the fundraising magic happen. It’s one thing to invest time cozying up to a single, well-heeled donor for $100,000. It’s quite another to spread the love to 5,000 donors for $20 each.

Can I get an amen from somebody on that?

How do you spread the love far and wide so the cash can flow from hither and yon? When you ask that question, you’re talking about scale. And when you’re talking about scale, you’re talking about needed efficiency gains so you can hit up bunches and bunches of people for cash. They need to be able to easily swipe their credit cards to give you that cash, you need to instantly record those donations once they do, you need to thank them effusively from the moment they cough up the cash, and you’ve got to keep their contact information handy to reach out to them later on with news and additional funding appeals.

So, I’ve got one question to ask you: Are you and your organization standing on the verge of getting it on when it comes to scaling fundraising efforts? Are your online donation and back office tools floating and connecting in the cloud so the dollars can swing down, sweet chariot, and let your mission ride? Or are you in need of the Mothership Connection to move your online fundraising strategies lightyears ahead?

Not sure? Let’s use this as a test: if you were to walk out of your office right this very moment for a month-long vacation on some beatific beach with no internet access, when you walked back into your office four weeks later, would you have an automated report ready and waiting of all of your online donations while you were gone, who gave them, how much they gave, the comfort of knowing they already were thanked, the joy of having their contact information all set for further follow up, and the beauty of easily shared charts and graphs demonstrating overall fundraising campaign performance?

If the answer is no, you should postpone that vacation until you check out this video and hit us up. When you do, you can call us Starchild and be prepared for your online fundraising strategies to get funked up.

The good folks at Community IT Innovators (CITI) mused on this topic the other day, leveraging a post by Bennett Grassano of TechSoup entitled Ten Tips for Funding Technology as food for thought while also diving into the NTEN & Progressive Exchange communities for ideas.

All of these ideas of how to shake the money tree to fund non-profit technology projects had us reflecting a little equation we posited back in November on this here blog:

Salesforce + Soapbox = $ ?

Or, put another way, can non-profits investing in technology to integrate their website and their Salesforce instance get a leg up on securing funding for those investments?

We be willing to bet dollars to donuts, as my grandmother used to say.

“Why?”, you query. We’d thought you’d never ask. Essentially, because it opens the door to check off several of those ten tips Bennet shares. The more you can integrate your website with your Salesforce instance, the more the silos between a static web presence and your back office systems get busted up in ways that make both more dynamic, more able to engage with clients and donors and supporters and members, and more wired to deliver program services and rather than talk about program services or bean count program services.

In other words, we’re talking program dollars, baby, rather than taht dreaded overhead line item on your budget’s Excel spreadsheet.

Got a page on your website describing your mentoring program? Great but not very persuasive for funders to cough up some cash. Got a page on your site that describes your mentoring program, a form that submits mentor applications directly to Salesforce, and a password-protected matching system also integrating with Salesforce for mentors to find mentees. Now you’ve got yourself a program.

“Whoa, you just jumped several orders of magnitude in terms of cost for that website, buddy!” you exclaim. “Sure, maybe it’s easier to get some funding for projects like that but you just radically increased the amount of funding we’d need to score.”

We hear ya. That’s the whole reason why we’re building affordable tools that integrate websites with Salesforce.

Got an idea for transforming your website into a program powerhouse by connecting it to Salesforce? Hit us up! We’d love to chat.

We’ve been busy with our friends at Great Place to Work since then as well, launching sites in Colombia, Sri Lanka, and now Nigeria, our first country in Africa.

With today’s launch, Soapbox now hosts sites for country locations on six continents – seven, if you’re feeling geopolitically adventurous and want to grant Chile, Argentina or Great Britain their claims to Antarctic territory since there are Soapbox sites in each.

Or perhaps Phil Penn Gwynn’s site is targeted his fellow sistern and brethren on Antarctic shores.

Reason #1: Everyone goes home with their own penguin

You’ll walk away from SUS12 with a new best friend and accidental techie, Phil Penn Gwynn, who can be that inflatable birdie on your shoulder as you tackle the latest and greatest updates to your website. What more could you ask for?

We can’t wait to welcome you on April 19th!

If you haven’t already, register now (while supplies last hehe).http://www.picnet.net/sus12.

HALT, or Help Abolish Legal Tyranny, is the nation’s largest legal reform organization – a nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest group of more than 20,000 members.

Well, now…how bad could this tyranny be if it’s legal, you ask? Does it really need to be abolished and should I even care?

Actually, it’s not tyranny which happens to be legal that these 20,000 members are trying to abolish. It’s the tyrannical aspects of the legal system that they are fighting against “to make America’s civil justice system more accessible and affordable for everyone”.

You’re part of everyone. You can get down with that.

At PICnet, we were happy to help them abolish website tyranny – moving them to a new Soapbox site that they have the freedom to update themselves and gives their visitors a more pleasing, engaging experience.

Old v. New Design

The new site (right) features a more current, visually appealing design that integrates social media links, clearer calls to action, and a rotating slideshow HALT can easily update.

Self-Help Center

HALT offers a wealth of information on a wide range of topics in its Self-Help Center. Need information on small claims court or representing yourself or the overall attorney-client relationship? How about estate planning or housing or living wills? Maybe your a senior in need of some information? It’s all there – plus much more – organized so visitors can find it and easily updated with new content by HALT.

Report Cards

As part of its objective to increase accountability within the legal justice system, HALT publishes report cards for all fifty states on small claims systems and lawyer discipline. The new site organizes this wealth of rich and important information in easily accessible ways so visitors can find what they’re after efficiently.

Curious about HALT?

Interested in finding out more? Check out their site to find out more about HALT and read up on the latest news or their most recent study which examines state practices in concealing information about ethics charges against lawyers.

Want to abolish your own website tyranny?

Hit us up! We’re happy to share the freedom Soapbox can give your organization.