Greetings!

It's the "Weekly Salsa Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

With end-of-year campaigns upon us and everyone looking for ways to make the most of every email, I thought I'd spotlight an oft-overlooked feature available for drilling into your email performance statistics: email open and click-through rates by group.

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This is the sort of thing to make me wish I still lived in D.C.

The monthly "Third Thursday" event, which takes place tomorrow from 3 to 5 p.m. at the home office on 1700 Connecticut, is a two-parter that should be well worth the red line transfer for anyone local.

• 3-4 p.m.: The new e-mail package.  A demo of the features in the new email tool we rolled out last week.
• 4-5 p.m.: E-mail strategy with Lizzie Kendrick of the DSCC.  Perhaps nobody has sent more emails with Salsa than Lizzie ... and she'll share the whys and the hows of conditional blast content, A/B testing, and other advanced mail testing and targeting.

Should be a great combination useful across the spectrum of list sizes, Salsa experience, and technical expertise.

RSVP.  Your conversion rates will thank you for it.

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The sequel to Day One of these notes from the New Organizing Institute, with Day Two spent ill abed.

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Greg Green, Blue State Digital

Difference between CRM & CMS Use CRM to track and contact campaign's supporter Use CMS to edit web site w/o a lot of updating Handy for 1. when there are a lot of people on the campaign updating things 2. when there are people in different locations who all need to access/update data 3. essential if there's a pretty large database of people you're contacting regularly and trying to track (e.g., you want to make sure you don't ask for money the day after they gave...)

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They're not pretty, but they're breathy with the immediacy of being there -- the New Organizing Institute training, to be exact. Oh, and Item! What prominent e-politics blogger actually takes his notes longhand? We won't tell, but he's ... ah, the devil, it's Colin at e.politics. The completeness, precision and comprehensibility of these notes are not warrantied.

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Morning session: Madeleine Stanionis, "Raising $$$ and Activating Supporters with Email"

Computer being obnoxious so parentheticals following are ex post facto recollections of an excellent presentation.

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Google has a President's Day weekend warm fuzz for anyone publishing their blog's RSS feed with FeedBurner: Google Reader and start pages have just begun reporting successfully to the service. Anyone with a blog that uses FeedBurner, as this one does, should be sure to hit their dashboard this week. Via ProBlogger, where comments suggest a bump of +50% or so -- right around the neighborhood DIA's spiked up -- is fairly typical.

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One of the pleasures of an otherwise meritless fantasy sports habit is learning to evaluate games and players in different ways. Baseball fans, for instance, will be at least passingly familiar with OPS, an only recently-popularized statistic for evaluating a player's offensive contribution more deeply than a batting average. Football Outsiders has done wonders -- and unearthed hidden insights, many rapidly becoming conventional wisdom -- with unorthodox analysis of NFL games. So my ears perked up when the indispensable Progressive Exchange mailing list took an innocuous inquiry about mailing every month as opposed to every other month* and galloped into a conversation about what metrics like e-mail open rates measure and whether they really matter. Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies struck the tocsin thusly:

We all — myself included — pay far too much attention to these measures because they are so easy to get. But are they really telling us anything important? Is your goal for a newsletter really to get them to click to your site, or is it to bond them to the organization?

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