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We noted in Friday's post World Cup, soccer strategy, and nonprofit success with Salesforce that one powerful way of fostering said nonprofit success with Salesforce is educating nonprofit Salesforce administrators to do for themselves. It just so happens that the Salesforce.com Foundation has two great ways for nonprofits to tool up, and they are free! For those watching the World Cup, it's obvious to see key differences between futbol on the world stage and football of the more provincial American style. The latter is a start and stop affair where huddles occur before every play with each player told where to run, where block, what to do. Much of the time, the strategy is to instruct the team in a way that applies the most force at a given point on the field to gain advantage over the opponent. Conformity to the plan and expert execution is of primary importance. Individual invention, save in very small measure, is of little concern. The team is a machine. The player a cog. Futbol, on the other hand, is an entirely different affair. There are no huddles. There are very few plays. There is an overarching strategy but it is left to small groups of individual players to orchestrate the execution of that strategy moment-by-moment by responding to their particular situation at a particular time in a particular way. Transformations that radically improve a nonprofit’s ability to meet its mission can often happen in unexpected ways. Just ask Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids: “We didn’t have a desire to redesign our website. We just wanted to move over our existing site from Convio Luminate to a new platform,” said Moss. “You almost had to be an expert with Convio to do anything with our previous system. That was no good for us.” Nonprofit marketer, Soapbox Engage just made your brain a lot mightier! Let's say you've got a campaign for which you're hoping to drive traffic to your website and capture conversions. In other words, you're trying to get folks to DO something once they hit your website: Give you money, buy some swag, register for an event. You get the idea. You're tweeting and Facebooking and blogging and all around shouting about it. But how do you know which of those efforts are producing the best results? Or no results? Global Fund for Women, a leader in advancing the rights of women and girls worldwide, is using Soapbox Petitions to mobilize thousands of supporters around the globe on behalf of survivors of rape in conflict areas such as eastern Congo and Syria.
Soapbox Petitions, the latest app in the Soapbox Engage online engagement platform, provides real-time integration with Salesforce for the capturing of supporter data and a mobile-friendly user experience to facilitate action on any device. Among the international soccer talent that much of the planet is obsessively following with each dribble, pass, and shot of the World Cup stands a 5'7" Argentine who many consider the best player of his generation, if not of all-time. Here are three traits that make Lionel Messi superb, and that the best nonprofits share with him. Let's talk numbers, shall we? To start, let's grab the number 1.92. 1.92 is the number of times more likely someone signing an online petition is to donate to a similar cause after signing. This was quantified by researchers Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh in their study Does Slacktivism Hurt Activism?: The Effects of Moral Balancing and Consistency in Online Activism. So, I sign your online petition, I am then almost twice as likely as someone who didn't sign that petition to give money to a cause that is similar to yours. Notice that didn't read "give money to your organization". Mark that. It'll be on the quiz later. The researchers also found that I'm more likely to take other actions in support of similar causes after signing your petition, provided those actions don't cost me much. A great example: signing another online petition. Soapbox Shop offers nonprofits ecommerce tools that integrate with Salesforce. Sell widgets or wares, subscriptions or swag, memberships or matchsticks, and have transaction and order data saved directly to Salesforce. What's more, using our user integration add on, you can restrict what products and price points can be selected by visitors according to login status, membership level, and more! 
Nothing is perfect but it is possible to use our inevitable failures to inspire innovation, and build the collaborative learning practices needed to become more competitive, effective and resilient organizations. Let's face it. We screw up. We make mistakes. We miss the target, or realize after scoring a direct hit that we were aiming at the wrong target all along. We fail. This is all the more true when we have lofty goals which are chock full of difficult targets to hit. And nonprofits are nothing if not organizations with lofty goals. They are looking to foster the social good by curing ugly, intractable problems that don't have easy answers or tried-and-true remedies. Nonprofits need to fail. It's often within failure that true innovation happens. As a grantmaker with Salesforce, learn how you can delight your applicants, radically simplify internal tasks to slash overhead, and get the absolute most out of your investment in Salesforce through Soapbox Engage. In a 30 minute webinar from 1 - 1:30 pm ET on May 22nd, we'll discuss the success that the Nathan Cummings Foundation as had with Soapbox Engage to demonstrate how your organization can: Back in late January, I signed a petition for a cause I believe in, sponsored by an organization I care about. I posted an article recounting how the entire branding of the experience wasn't associated with the organization or the cause but with the well-known petition site hosting the form. That led to a simple question for those using online petitions: Are you building your own brand or someone else's with your online petition solution? Nearly three months after that signing, the question is all the more relevant after the seventeen follow up emails I've received. |
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