Tags
Tags are a relatively new concept in web technologies, but are quickly becoming a de facto standard for managing information online. In essence, tags are user-applied
"Within the Salsa interface, you can apply custom tags to nearly anything, and then later pull those resources together in a tag report."
keywords that can be sorted on in various ways to produce impromptu collections of, for example, images (using Flickr), videos (using YouTube or Google Video), website bookmarks (using del.icio.us), or news stories (Slashdot, Technorati). You choose an item (a picture, video, site, news story), decide on a descriptive tag ("sunset," "wedding," "humor," "politics"), and apply the tag to the item. Then, any time you need to see all the pictures of sunsets, or wedding videos, or humorous websites, or political news stories, you search on those tags (or click a tag name, depending on the interface), and results are automatically aggregated around the tag you applied earlier.
Within the Salsa interface, you can apply custom tags to nearly anything, and then later pull those resources together in a tag report. If you were managing an effort to, say, save the endangered Woodson's Marmoset, you could create an advocacy campaign to raise legislative awareness of the issue, create a petition targeting the appropriate executive branch organization head, and create an informational page with a signup form. You'd then apply tags to each of those pages, which would in turn apply tags to the people who signed up or took action through them. At any point, you could do a tag search for your "marmoset" tag, and pull back all the pages tagged with it, and all the supporters who associated themselves with it by taking action or requesting updates on the issue. Learn more about tagging and other special features here.
Scoring
Now take tags and combine them with scoring. Scoring allows you to set your own score for each activity any of your supporters partake in. For example, you may assign one point for subscribing to your email list, two points for attending an event, and three points for every dollar someone donates. This allows you to "score" your supporters. Now you can see who your "super-supporters" are by quickly glancing at their score.
As a bonus, the scores decay over time, pushing the most current activists/donors/volunteers to the top of the list. Now you have a goldmine of data on your supporters. Find out how how your whales campaign did by seeing how it changed your supporters' scores over time, for instance: if your overall supporter list score increased during the same time your ran your whales campaign, you'd be safe to say that you had a success.
Customization
Perhaps the single most important innovation in Salsa is the ability to personalize your experience. Because we work with all kinds of progressive organizations - small to large; local to international - we created the most flexible and customizable solution available.
"Because we work with all kinds of progressive organizations - small to large; local to international - we created the most flexible and customizable solution available."
*You* tell Salsa what you need to do, and how you like to do it. From data entry screens to reporting to the "dashboard" nerve center, everything in Salsa can be crafted for convenience of each different user. We will provide commonly used workflows, but if you're used to a different interface, change it around until you're comfortable with it.
You'll even have the ability to create your own tools using what we're calling "custom workflows". Say you need a ride board, but DIA doesn't provide a stock tool that does exactly what you need it to do. Create your own fields, custom objects, and workflow. Name it, save it, and you'll be all set with a brand new tool.
Custom Report Builder
You wanted more ability to measure your effectiveness and we listened. With Salsa's rich package of default reports and its flexible custom report generator, all kinds of new data is instantly at your fingertips.
Now, it's easy to manage your membership, graph your financial performance, or drill into your campaign actions. Customize the reports and data you see for your fundraising manager, your ED, your interns, your volunteers, and yourself. You can then save your custom reports to display on your HQ homepage or any other dashboard page for easy access to the information that's most important to you.
