Quick Start - Tags
Tags
A tag is a user-applied keyword you can optionally assign to anything you create in Salsa to describe the item. Tags enable a powerful search feature and can help you monitor a project by quickly seeing everything that's been done in Salsa around it.
Tags are easy to get started with. Tags are located under "Dashboard Collections" > "Manage Tags" (see image).
Tags have two basic properties that give them their power: search, and stickiness.
Creating a tag:
You can apply a tag to anything you've created in Salsa -- an individual supporter, an e\-mail blast, a donation, an action -- by entering the edit screen for that object and typing in a tag in the box in the upper right-hand corner (see image below).
The following characters are allowed in tags: a-z, A-Z, 0-9, ! : ; % @ / . , _ ( ) $ ? # + -
Searching for a tag:
Using the search bar across the top of your Salsa admin pages, search for -- where 'tagname' is the tag you've just applied. Salsa returns everything in the system tagged as 'tagname'.
If you've just created a new tag, there will only be the one entry. But you can use the searchability of tags to monitor different things you create in Salsa according to your organization's own actual projects.
For example, 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, create an informational page with a signup form, and send several e-mail blasts about the issue. You could give the same tag -- say, "marmoset" -- to each of those pages. At any point, you could do a tag search for "tag:marmoset" and pull back all the pages tagged "marmoset".
Voila! An instant overview of your Woodson's Marmoset effort.
Tag Stickiness:
Now that you've got different pages and e-mail blasts tagged, you can take advantage of tags' other great feature: stickiness.
Any Salsa page you create will apply its tags to the supporters who use it. So, anyone signing up through a page tagged "marmoset" also receives the tag "marmoset" on their individual supporter record. And if there's a gift through an online donation page with that tag, both the donor and the gift itself will be tagged "marmoset".
What does this do for you?
It enriches your searches into full-fledged reports that give you a view of the true scope of your work: now you have at your fingertips the exact number of people who have taken part in a project and the total amount they've given to it.
This also opens up a variety of tracking options for you. You can report based on tags, for example, by creating a custom report and "filtering by tag" (see image).
