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Ready for a spring lineup of live online seminars?  Idealware has a great slate scheduled for this month, including a NEW session on Getting Started with Mobile Outreach. Don’t see what you’re looking for in the schedule?  Make sure to check our library of on-demand recordings, offered for only $20 each.

Our live seminars are capped at 25 participants, so you’ll have lots of opportunity to ask questions and get just the information you need. All you need is an internet connection and a phone line to participate.  Each of these seminars are only $40 per participant for a 90-minute workshop.

Getting Started with Mobile Outreach
Thursday March 18th, 1:00 – 2:30 EST
It’s easier that you might think to broadcast text messages to your supporters’ cell phones, to ask them to respond to a quick question, or even to ask them to donate right through their phone. We’ll talk through the principles, software packages, and best practices that can help.

Getting Started with Email Fundraising
Thursday March 25th, 1:00 – 2:30 EST
How do you design and write an email campaign that will work?  What tools can help you send emails and collect online donations?   We’ll walk through what you’ll need to know to design your own email fundraising campaign.

Getting Started with Online Conferencing
Thursday April 1st, 1:00 – 2:30 EST
What tools can help you conduct meetings or training over the Web? We’ll talk about the features that can help, and compare some of the free and affordable options.

Check out www.idealware.org/online_seminars for more information and more seminars, or  http://www.idealware.org/online_seminars/recordings.php for a full list of on-demand recordings. Idealware is an awesome nonprofit service organization that provides technical capacity building to other nonprofits and publishes consumer-style reports on software targeted to nonprofits.

Winners will be recognized at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC 2011) in Atlanta in April, and on YouTube, and each winning organization will receive a $2,500 grant from the Case Foundation and a custom Flip camera. To enter, organizations must be a member of YouTube Nonprofit Program.

The deadline is March 19. We know some of you out there have a video that should be submitted. Apply today!

If you’re from a school, church, or synagogue in the greater DC area, post any help you need this weekend for snow clean up, and we’ll crowdsource the community to help you in your efforts!

All you need to do is follow these simple steps:

1. Go to www.snowmageddoncleanup.com/reports/submit
2. Post your request for help using a title in this format:  “School:  Washington Elementary School” or “Church:  Episcopal Church of Washington”
3. Make sure to specify clearly what your needs are in the body of your report (example: “We’ve got snow covering all our walkways, we need snowblowers and shovels”) and include your location in your report and using the map function.  Also, clearly state when you need people to arrive for help this weekend (example: “we’re looking for 10 people from the neighborhood to come help at 10am on Saturday”).
4. After your report is approved by our team, you can use the link to your report to spread the word.  We’ll do the same on Twitter (using the #72scu hashtag) and on our Facebook Fan page.
5. Keep checking the comments in your report, and encourage others to post their attendance in the comments of your report.

We’ll take these reports and highlight them on Twitter, Facebook, and the Web site!  Let’s clean up our schools, churches, and synagogues one snow shovel at a time!

Check out our site embedded on the Washington Post!

Wow.  Thursday was a whirlwind.  We worked closely with the Washington Post’s digital media team to make editorial and graphical changes to the site in order to prep for the wave of traffic from their online circulation.  Additionally, the great logo that Christopher Doorley made for the site needed to have a little update: announcing the partnership between the Washington Post and PICnet.  Thanks to Ross Nover for his stellar design skills to help update the site’s header and additional illustrations.

It’s been wonderful working alongside the Washington Post team to help spread the word far and wide.  We’re excited to see the continued efforts of the Greater DC community to help each other out of this snow mess.

Check out the video and stay tuned for more great “stuff” coming out of the Free Range folks!

There are few events where I get such a great opportunity to meet key individuals in the community, and learn as much hands-on information, and this year’s Dev Summit came through once again. The event was held in Oakland, Calif. from Nov. 18-20, attended by non-profit software developers, evangelists, and technology users.

I was fortunate to speak with Nate Aune from Jazkarta and share stories about building successful businesses around open-source software and the non-profit sector.  I  also had a chance to engage in discussions with Michelle Murrain of OpenIssues, who shared her thoughts on the open-source CMS landscape for the non-profit sector. Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla! leadership team, also spoke to the group about  design principles and the upcoming Joomla 1.6 user interface.

There were so many more great folks there that I want to give shout outs to, but there is so little time to say thanks to all of them! Aside from hearing from some of these great people, I spoke on a number of key topics, including open-source CMSs, utilizing cloud services, the Joomla! project, and open-source business models that could support our sector. I was most impressed by the terrific feedback and engagement in the open-source business models session, where participants helped share lessons learned and best practices in achieving success while also building sound business models.

You can visit the event wiki to see all the great notes taken during the sessions.

So before we all take off to our Thanksgiving gatherings with friends and family, filling ourselves with turkey or tofu, I wanted to take an opportunity to share my thanks to those that have helped keep the PICnet flag flying high in 2009.

First and foremost, many thanks to my PICnet team. These hearty individuals have dedicated their work lives to help organizations fundraise and gain thought leadership through the fog of uncertainty in a difficult year. I couldn’t ask for a better team, and I’m thankful for their never-ending commitment to our sector and the PICnet Salon Experience.

Of course, none of us would have jobs if we didn’t have stellar clients that make the world a better place. We learn as much as we teach, and I appreciate the opportunity to have our company provide services to those changing the world, working in the field and on the front lines, one mission at a time.

I’m thankful for our partners and PICnet advocates. Great companies like Free Range Studios, Big Duck NYC, NPower NY, Democracy in Action, Salesforce.com, and Jessica Weber Design (there’s more too!) stand side-by-side with our team to provide critical communication and design services and tools for our community. As individual firms we can achieve good results, but as collective teams we can achieve great success for the sector.  Building bridges continues to be a core foundation of all our work, and we look forward to continued success with our partners and advocates.

Finally, I’m thankful for the continued contributions and success of the Joomla! community, and all the other open source communities that allow us to provide stellar tools to our organizations. Without these open source projects, our non-profit sector wouldn’t have the rich abundance of affordable tools we see today.

What are you thankful for this year?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

With J!Salesforce, organizations and businesses using the powerful Salesforce.com CRM can now seamlessly share data with the Joomla CMS.

This has been a long and winding road, but we’re proud of the new suite of extensions, and look forward to delivering them to the world.  This release of J!Salesforce 1.0 is currently available to new and current Non-Profit Soapbox organizations and businesses.  Sign-up now!

Key Features

This new suite of tools includes our first step in strong integration of Joomla and Salesforce.com, including:

• connectivity between Joomla and the Contacts object in Salesforce.com
• Joomla user registration with additional custom fields that auto-populate a corresponding Salesforce.com new contact
• profile updating syncing with Salesforce.com
• search directory extension, providing a searchable interface of your Contacts object from Salesforce.com through your Joomla Web site (especially useful for membership directories)
• a user-friendly, customizable and templateable search form, results page, and detailed view page for Salesforce.com Contact records in Joomla

This is just the beginning!  Our vision for version 2.0 includes:

• a multi-object form builder, allowing connectivity between Joomla and any object in Salesforce.com
• ability to create and edit multiple forms
• additional administrator management of Salesforce.com records

Limited-time offer

Until November 30, 2009, new Soapbox clients can request the J!Salesforce add-on for FREE!  Interested in signing up for Soapbox with the powerful J!Salesforce connector?  Fill-out our form and we’ll get you started right away.

Well, we’re here to help you make that happen! For a limited time, PICnet is offering Soapbox Launchpad, a special $2,500 website package that will provide qualifying non-profits and socially responsible businesses with our Non-Profit Soapbox services at our most affordable pricing ever.  Our Soapbox Launchpad is a terrific opportunity to get you up and running with an easy-to-manage and great looking website — quickly and affordably.

This special package will be available only until November 15, 2009, and limited to 100 qualifying organizations, so apply now!

What’s Included

Our special Soapbox Launchpad package includes the following:

• A fully functional Non-Profit Soapbox website (powered by Joomla!)
• Rapid launch timeline for the holiday season
• Dozens of beautiful, professionally designed templates to choose from
• Guidance on information architecture
• Online credit card processing connection to applicable services
• Hosting and support services

Apply Now!

By providing this package beyond our standard discounting schedule, we want organizations to gain even further savings. Help us understand how a new website can help you more effectively build a better world.  Any organization or business can apply!

This year has been a tough one, and you deserve a break.  Apply now for our Soapbox Launchpad package, and enjoy the power of Joomla! with strong support by your friends at PICnet.

The event is free, but space is limited, so RSVP now if you plan on attending! It is hosted at the San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center.

Check it out here.

What is Mozilla Service Week? Starting tomorrow, techies will be donating their time (more than 9,000 hours pledged so far and counting) to help make a difference in their communities and the world – and doing it all online! You can sign up to volunteer here, or just to find out more about this exciting week of web service.