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At PICnet, we dig choice. Choice is good. Choice is especially good when it comes to ways our clients can collect money for donations, membership dues, and event registrations seamlessly on their sites through Soapbox Donations and Soapbox Events. Choice + money = all sorts of goodness. That goodness just got a bit gooder for our do-gooder clients with the addition of Braintree Payments as a payment processor option. Now our clients have the choice of PayPal Pro, Authorize.net, or Braintree when it comes to folks swiping their credit cards virtually to support their cause. Why Braintree? It’s not just for the name which makes us feel smart and earthy every time we say it. They’ve developed quite a rep for being both developer-friendly and customer-friendly. Just check out to what Pascal Finette, Director of Mozilla Labs at Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser you just might be using to read this, had to say about Braintree: “Braintree is phenomenal – not only do they have a proper payments API (try to find that somewhere else!) and constantly innovate on every aspect of the business, but their team is also redefining what great service looks like. In our terms: A whole lot of Awesome.”Goodness AND awesomeness. That’s quite a one-two punch – and now it’s available in Soapbox.
If you’d like to see a list of this growing community of socially responsible businesses, the new BenefitCorp.net website will grant that wish. And given that their Benefit Corp search directory is fed live from B Lab’s CRM database—Salesforce.com— you’ll be able to see the list automagically grow almost before your eyes as more and more organizations join the ranks. Read more »
But don’t just take our word for it. PICnet had the pleasure of working with New York-based non-profit, The Bridge, on their handsome new site. Here’s what they said.
What got Ann so excited? First, let’s look at the before and after shots. PICnet is proud to be a long-time supporter of NTEN (Non-profit Technology Network), which is why we do our best to keep the NPtech love flowing from coast to coast with our monthly 501 Tech Club happy hours. I organize the meetings for the DC “Accidental Techies” on the fourth Thursday of every month while my co-worker, Lauren Grau, coordinates the San Francisco NTENers one night each month. The NTEN Happy Hours are a great way to meet more people in your field, learn something new about non-profit management, and keep up with today’s ever-changing technology. And don’t worry; you don’t have to be an NTEN member to join, so invite your friends! This week is a very busy one on the PICnet social calendar as both Lauren and I have happy hours. Find details below. Read more » We’re doing a bit of work creating user-friendly and affordable engagement tools for non-profits. Much of this work is connecting our Soapbox services to Salesforce’s Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP). A goal in our integration is to make it as seamless as possible for organizations to use the NPSP out of the box with Soapbox. One of the things we’ve documented are the record types utilized by the NPSP. These record types are important, as we’re able to have our Soapbox service pass event registrations, petitions, donations, and more through Salesforce. This seemed a little difficult for us to find, and we’ve been seeing some inconsistencies in the creation of record types in the NPSP (I think others have as well), so I thought we’d document what we’ve found.
Have others found similar differences between these NPSP installations? Ask any economist, and you’ll likely hear the same response: as markets mature, consolidation tends to occur. So, while it’s big news, it’s not necessarily surprising to hear today’s announcement that Blackbaud is purchasing Convio. These two publicly traded corporations have been in the non-profit technology space for a long time, and I congratulate their boards on coming to such an important agreement. Now, let’s get to the real business at hand: what can be done now to ensure technology service prices go down, not up, in an era of mega consolidation? Our answer: a fresh approach with a dose of healthy competition.
And then you look at the price tags being charged to leverage all of this fancy, powerful stuff. It can be staggering. It isn’t uncommon for us to attend conferences and sit in rooms with panel discussions showing off a nonprofit’s custom-built solution to integrate their website, constituent relationship management system, email marketing platform, and other communication channels. The screenshots are slick. The crowd is wowed. The mind races with the possibilities for one’s own organization. Until the price tag is quoted. It’s usually toward the end of the presentation. It’s often mentioned almost as an afterthought. “We paid $100,000 to a web development firm just for the front end web interface. The CRM setup was separate.” Or, “we raised $200,000 for this implementation.” Staggering. And everyone leaves the room feeling as if they live in a two-room shack and just watched an episode of Cribs that highlighted what they can never have. It’s all great and impressive and inspiring – but the real question rolling around in everyone’s head as they hit the hallway to go to the next session is: “Damn! How in the world could they raise six figures for a web project?!?” Bay Area non-profit techies, mark January 18th on your calendars! Our friends at Aspiration have partnered with Community Technology Network to hold a no cost nonprofit technology training at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA on January 18th. This Nonprofit Technology Teach-In aims to help you learn new techniques and best practices to take advantage of online tools for your work. Aspiration events are famously hands-on, highly interactive and follow a question-driven format. Together you’ll tackle the following questions:
With many of us still packing up the holiday lights and cleaning up after New Years bashes, we were impressed to see the good folks over at the Nonprofit Marketing Guide arriving into 2012 all bright eyed and bushy tailed with the release of the 2012 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. Not a bad way to get a jump on the new year! A couple of the findings caught our eye. As folks doing web development for nonprofits, we were happy to see organizations rank their website as their most important tool. Job security and all that, you know!
Their website was followed closely in importance by Email Marketing / E-Newsletter. That Iowa-Republican-caucus-like close second is not surprising when you see that 78% of nonprofits say they’ll email supporters at least monthly in 2012.
That’s a lot of emails – and, for anyone who has priced mass email services, those mass emails ain’t cheap. So, again, it’s not surprising that the list of what scares folks when it comes to nonprofit marketing in 2012 includes some big, juicy orange words revolving around having enough resources and funding to pull off all of this marking stuff.
That leads us at PICnet to ponder a simple question for our own nonprofit technology sector: Can we do better? As 2012 dawns and more and more nonprofits move away from traditional mailings to engage in regular email marketing campaigns, can our industry innovate to keep pace by developing new, more cost effective ways of delivering those services and do so in ways that more tightly tracks outcomes tied to individual recipients rather than dubious metrics like open rates? For those lovers of nonprofits who are convinced that technology can supercharge their missions to make more flowers bloom, more hungry folk fed, more truth shine, and more peace reign, we should finish putting away our holiday lights and cleaning up after the New Year’s bashes. There’s a world that needs changing and it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to do it. Yesterday we launched the new and improved Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS) site. CUCS has been our client since 2008 and has found a new home just in time for the holidays on Soapbox 2.x. With this migration from Soapbox 1.x they are going to be able to take advantage of all of the great features that are now available, including:
Paul Howard, CUCS’s Associate Director of Training and Consulting Services worked closely with us on this project. He says,
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Benefit Corporations are no stranger to being ahead of the curve, and that especially true for B Lab’s 
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