While new technologies are constantly emerging, rarely do they give nonprofits the freedom and convenience of integration without limiting them to expensive, proprietary vendors. In this session, we will showcase an "Open Civic Engagement Platform" that knits together low-cost, high-quality solutions to power nonprofit communications. This robust platform has a solid track record of handling diverse needs - from startup organizations to some of the largest nonprofits. If your organization is seeking a way to bring together web content management, email broadcasting, relationship management, online activism, e-commerce and more, this session will provide concrete examples and an informative overview of what to expect from leading solutions.

This platform is built on a set of hosted tools that play well with others via "Open APIs". Key players in this new software ecosystem include:

    * Salesforce.com and their game-changing software + services donation program

    * Plone, a powerful and user-friendly open-source content management system, including ecommerce tools

    * Salsa/Democracy In Action, an online advocacy and donation system

    * Vertical Response, Exact Target and others: powerful email broadcasting tools

Given Salesforce.com Foundations donation of licenses to nonprofits (over 6,000 organizations benefiting with a 97% satisfaction rate), this enterprise tool is readily accessible and already proving a powerful solution for nonprofits. The Salesforce.com Foundation funded the initial integration between Plone and salesforce.com, which has been constantly improved over the last five years.

This session will provide a variety of demos of the technology, building on the success of the session from the 2009 conference (and subsequent webinars and presentations), including new demonstrations of donation handling, event registration/management, and making data in salesforce interactive in Plone.

Session Takeaways:

1.  What the new age of open, connected, software flexible enough to meet nonprofit needs looks like

2.  When these tools make sense and what it takes to get them in place for a nonprofit

3.  Real-world demonstrations of production-quality integration between best-of-breed systems like Plone, Salesforce, Salsa

Level: Intermediate