(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday!)

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, check out Salsa Commons for news, updates, and conversation every day.

And allow me to be the first to wish you an only slightly premature Happy New Year! Here's to a great year ahead.

Automatic Upgrades

One of the things we'll be doing to help keep your Salsa account shipshape is automatically upgrading accounts with our newest improved packages on Jan. 4.

The new Email, Actions, and Events tools have each been available for a while. You can add them today in your own headquarters, if you don't want to wait for the automatic upgrade. (And I recommend you do add them right away: they're better.) But those accounts that haven't added them will see them automatically installed next Monday.

Already upgraded these tools? Then like most of our users, you won't experience a thing when we automatically upgrade: you've already got the state-of-the-art installation.

Haven't upgraded yet? You'll see some minor changes in the user interface and some added features to take advantage of. It won't hurt, I promise! All these tools are out of "beta" status and have been extensively user-tested.

In addition to insuring that you're using the best code we have to offer, the automatic upgrade will let us stop spending development time to keep up the older features and invest it in enhancing other areas of Salsa instead.

So, out with the old, and in with the new! It's just the first of many great Salsa improvements you can look forward to in 2010. I'm looking forward to sharing them with you in the coming year.

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Free petition tools have long lineage on the Internet; they're one of the evolutionary forebears of comprehensive online communications platforms like Salsa.

So it was only fitting when Change.org went looking to bring the boring standalone online petition out of the Stone Age that it looked to Salsa for some tools beyond a stone wheel and a mastodon-bone club.

Behold: the just-launched Change.org petition, the most powerful online petition tool on the web.

In addition to a friendly interface that Change.org built, it's got a hook to the Salsa back end for add-ons like district-matched message targeting, so that petition signers' messages go straight to the people that need to hear them.

This, of course, comes standard with all the usual petition tools too, plus login access for the petition creator to manage the petition drive. Take it for a spin here.

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Health Care for America Now rode the news cycle with this Salsa action page on this weekend's House health care vote.

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A big victory for longtime Salsa users Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood made the New York Times on Friday:

the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those "Baby Einstein" videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

"We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds," said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

If you're not wise to the scam, what you do is take a dubious connection between music and early childhood intelligence, overstate its conclusion beyond any bounds of plausibility, and sponge up a few hundred million dollars. (Ironically, the real baby Einstein was a late bloomer.)

CCFC, as noted, has been on this for ages, like this (now-outdated) action. You can find what they're working on today in CCFC's action center.

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The Salsa-using Center for Biological Diversity ran an action in its newsletter last week asking its members to take an online action to protect the California condor by messaging the Kern County, Calif., county supervisors in opposition to a development that would encroach condor habitat.

Evidently, it hit its mark.

Kern County Supervisors' electronic mail accounts exploded with more 1,200 form e-mails Thursday as a nationwide digital campaign launched its opposition to the Tejon Mountain Village project.

A nice bit of earned media ... followed by a familiar refrain of the put-upon public official compelled to endure public input to their public mail addresses: it's spaaaaaaaaaaam!

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I was happy to have the chance to wander up to Democracy In Action's offices in Dupont Circle in Washington DC for Third Thursday training in September to talk about why my organization, Clean Water Action, has been using the (still-in-beta) Actions 2.0 module for just about year. Two things that go a long way toward helping us achieve our organizational goals are 1) better targeting and 2) detailed reporting.

Better Targeting

Clean Water Action is a national organization but we do a significant percentage of our work on the state legislative level where the relationship between legislators and NGOs is a little bit closer than on the Federal level. With the Advocacy module we got a lot of feedback from legislators that they were getting messages from outside their districts. This was particularly damaging in our work with legislators who were not entirely supportive of legislation or other changes that we were working to get passed.

Better Reporting

Have you seen an Actions 2.0 report? Well, if you haven't, you're going to be amazed, and your organizers/program/campaigns people will be too if they're anything like my folks.

The reporting on Actions 2.0 gives you almost all the features you'd want (I can't very well say all because I'm sure someone will need something I haven't thought of). The report tells you:

1. how many total actions have been taken

2. how many unique supporters took action (because yes, sometimes supporters come back and send the letter or sign the petition again)

E-mail on this action went out on a Wednesday for a California state legislature session that closed on Saturday. Even though this was a small response, precise targeting helped defeat this bill.

3. what the count of messages is per target, whether that's custom targets or legislator or executive targets

Detailed information on which legislators received how many e-mails allowed our campaigners to go to Sacramento armed with hard facts and not just a "feeling" about how our supporters' (the legislators' constituents) thought about this bill.

4. if a message was customized - with the added bonus of being able to view those customizations right in the report screen

A quick glance can tell us if our supporters are just sending what we provided as sample text or if they're getting more involved.

Being able to view the customizations right in the report helps us to identify the level of involvement supporters have with a given issue. It also helps us determine whether or not our forms are being abused for purposes - such as using an action we set up on the Clean Water Restoration Act to lobby Congress on other issues - that don't align with the organization's mission.

But how does Actions 2.0 help us better achieve our organizational goals? In a couple of ways:

It significantly reduces the number of out-of-district messages our state legislator targets are getting. By easing this burden through better district matching, we're able to use the information we have on our online actions more effectively. But that's not all.

Actions 2.0 allows me to maximize the resources we do have in my department because all of its processes are streamlined into one simple interface.

In 2007 Clean Water Action used the Advocacy module to promote passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act. We did four rounds of actions and blast e-mails. The first two rounds were what is called "thank and spank" actions. This required that for each round of "thank and spank" I build a separate action for each group: 2 rounds x (1 Thank you + 1 Spank) means that I built 4 actions.

For 2009 we're now promoting passage of the bill through the Senate and, yes, doing "thank and spank" actions but this time we're using the Actions 2.0 module. We've done two rounds of actions so far and I've built 2 unique actions because the Actions 2.0 module incorporates this type of multi-content target action right into the tool.

While Actions 2.0 is technically still in beta testing and there are still some glitches, and while I know that the fabulous staff at DIA has some improvements planned, the good in Actions 2.0 outweighs the still kinda hinky.

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Great stuff happens when you mix a tool kit like Salsa with a creative campaign concept.

Case in point: WeWantThePublicOption.com

This custom-built petition page offers signers the prospect of their name appearing on an advertisement that will air in the D.C. area in favor of the public option. It's a great way to show impact from an online petition as well as recognize the activists that sign it. And as you can see, it's clearly all about the cause -- not the sponsoring organization, which is practically invisible on the page.

So, how would one build a page like this? On the technical side, they've used our robust API to create a custom form that populates signers into particular groups. This does require working at the level of the code, but it's nothing more complex than HTML, The same process could just as easily be used to register people for Salsa events, apply Salsa tags, or create any other kind of headquarters data. While they could have hosted this type of page themselves, they've chosen to place it on a Salsa content page so that we pay the bandwidth freight when they get picked up by BoingBoing. Either way is fine by us.

The overall layout and design of the page itself, of course, are wholly custom jobs that Salsa doesn't directly facilitate. Once you've got a design, however, it's a simple matter of including the HTML in the layout of thecustom page.

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