The Salsa Menu

This online user manual for the Salsa toolset is a "living document" to help you get the most out of the toolset - whether you're a brand-new user just getting oriented or an old hand looking for a specific answer. As Salsa grows and evolves, this manual will, too - so check back for updates, or drop a line (documentation @ salsacommons.org) if you see something you need to be fixed, amended, expanded, added or clarified. As you navigate, you can always go back "up a level" using the directory links at the very top left of the browser window.

Original Recipe Salsa Packages

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  Dashboard (old dashboard)

  The "Dashboard" tab is where Salsa keeps a variety of system information and data architecture for your system. Mostly, you'll come here when you're doing things to configure the way you or your fellow campaign managers experience the tools.

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  Supporter Management

  This upgrade enhances the supporter management package with a newer version of the query builder. While the interface looks primarily the same, we've added some new conditions to build your query upon.

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  Email Blast (Upgrade)

  Salsa enables your organization to send professional-looking, targeted, personalized campaign alerts and newsletters to any subset of a list. The process is streamlined and user friendly: write, target, send. Use this tab to create new e-mail blasts (mass messages to your supporters), retrieve performance data on previous messages, and automate e-mail interaction with your supporters with auto-response acknowledgment messages you can add to action pages.

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  Advocacy Campaigns

  Use the Advocacy tab to build web pages your supporters can use for online activism - write-your-rep pages, letters to the editor and petitions. The signature Advocacy tool in Salsa is Actions, which enables you to build variegated and flexible advocacy pages, often (though not necessarily) using Salsa's sophisticated address localization and constituent targeting capabilities.

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  Donation Management

  Salsa allows you to collect donations and payments online, tightly integrating donor history with your supporter list. Use this tab to create several different types of transaction-processing pages (note: paid event registration pages can be created in the Events section), and to search and report on donations and payments you've actually received.

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  Website Features

  Salsa can help you create a variety of pages for publication to your users in addition to advocacy, donation and event pages. A smorgasbord of options - both "form"-type pages where a user is asked to submit information (such as a signup form) and static pages simply meant to publish content (such as content items) - is available in the website tab. The web tools package is the prerequisite for all Salsa Web features, and starts with Content Items and Signup pages as the default.

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  Chapters & Volunteers

  Chapters are more advanced tools to help an organization with chapters, affiliates, or a distributed local presence engage its supporters locally by giving field organizers access to "chapterized" Salsa information in their particular area. Chapter setup varies greatly by user organization, so contact your Salsa host, provider or ASP for more information about using chapters. Also note that Salsa's campaign manager permissioning architecture may allow you to give controlled access without using chapters.

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  Reports & Statistics

  Salsa collects a great deal of information - supporter information, donor history, activism, and much more - that you may want to access in many different ways. The Reports and Statistics tab helps you build customized reports that you can run from this tab or place on your dashboards to keep your metrics at your fingertips.

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  Events

  Use the Events tab to create registration pages for all kinds of events. The regular "Events" tool builds one-off events (such as a conference or a webinar) for which you can offer either a free RSVP page or a paid registration page. The "Distributed Events" tool allows you to structure house parties, meetups, and other peer-to-peer organizing that lets your strongest supporters be your local ambassadors by building their own events.