Activity and Form Overview

The best way to inspire action and ignite change is by growing your base of supporters and activating them. This is the place to do it! Use the sign-up and fundraising forms, petitions, targeted letters & events you create here to find, activate, and engage your supporters in order to achieve your goals!

An activity is something you do to engage with your supporters and motivate them to take action. Salsa Engage provides several tools to enable you to engage supporters in various ways. This topic provides an overview of Salsa Engage Activities. After you have read it, you can then visit each type of Activity to read documentation covering specific Salsa Engage Activities.

Types of Activities/Forms

Activities include the following:

• Sign-up Forms enables your supporters to join your list. You can embed Sign-up Forms on your site and have them hosted in Salsa.
• Fundraising enables your supporters to donate to your organization. You can embed Fundraising forms on your site and have them hosted in Salsa.
• Petitions enables your supporters to lend their voice to your cause. You can embed Petitions on your site and have them hosted in Salsa.
• Targeted Actions enables your supporters to email and/or call legislators and post to Social about your causes.
• Events enables you to create, manage, and measure the success of your free or paid events. With features like customizable ticket-types, custom questions and editable RSVPs, events in Salsa are a breeze.
• Peer to Peer enables you to create, manage, promote, and measure the success of your Peer to Peer Events. Inspiring your supporters to raise money for your organization has never been simpler. Engage's P2P tools are powerful and easy to use.

Workflow

Creating each activity involves the same basic workflow:

1. Start your new activity by electing to start from scratch, use one of our predesigned templates, or copy an already existing form.
2. Set up an internal reference name and other Basic data.
3. Design or modify the form using the Visual Editor for Forms.
4. Publish your form.
5. Promote your form.
6. Analyze results.

Each workflow has a couple of 'breadcrumb' trails to follow. The first series of breadcrumbs lead you through the trail of which activity you're in. The second trail leads you through the workflow process of each form or message.

Some activities require specific account-wide settings to be in place ahead of time. In order to accept donations via fundraising forms, for example, a payment gateway must be set up. To post messages via Facebook and Twitter, users must link those accounts to their Salsa account.

Merge Fields

Merge Fields function as a placeholder for data that Salsa Engage will pull from the database. For example, if you generate autoresponder emails thanking a donor for their donation and include "Dear [[First Name]]," [[First Name]] is a merge field that dynamically populates for each letter that is emailed. Merge Fields are supported in all activities.

To add a merge field, add a Text Element, click the pencil icon to edit it, and then select the icon that shows the head and shoulders of a person.

Several other Elements are pre-populated with Merge Fields:

• OrgInfo
• Location
• Event Dates

Activities Dashboard

The Activities Dashboard provides a birds-eye view of all activities and the ability to create an activity.  To navigate to the Activities Dashboard, select Activities from the left column. To create a new activity click the Start an Activity button in the upper right-hand corner of the window, and then choose an activity type.

Key Metrics

Key metrics about activities such as email blasts and fundraising widgets are displayed at the top of the screen.

• Total Number of Supporters is the total number of people who have been added to your organization's audience within the given timeframe.  They may have been added via a sign-up page, a fundraising page, or a petition. They may also have been added to your account via import.
• Total Funds Raised includes total dollars raised on any fundraising forms including Events or P2P.
• Totals from any of your other contracted forms, such as Targeted Actions or Petitions.

At the bottom of the dashboard is a list of all of the activities started. You can see the status of each one and you can also click the name of any of the activities to go directly into viewing/editing it.