NationBuilder is a web-based campaign management solution suitable for political campaigns and non-profit organizations. It includes integrated features of both content and membership management which help clients to reach their audience and engage with supporters. It serves customers across various sectors including nonprofits, advocacy, education and government, and is suitable for SMBs and enterprises. Some of its customers are Amnesty International, Airbnb, DMO, United Way, New Jersey Democratic State Committee and Republican Party of Florida.
NationBuilder allows political organizations to map the locations of their supporters geographically and create custom lists to track supporter information for efficient targeting. It helps to capture the contact information of both people and organizations, and link that to various social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to engage with supporters. Clients can also build customized websites to interact with supporters and track the overall progress of the engagement through a real time dashboard.
NationBuilder can be used by non-profit organizations for engaging with volunteers and donors to promote fundraising events across different online channels. The solution offers email blasting capability which lets users send personalized emails to individuals, groups or entire members in one go. Organizations can create personal fundraising pages and engage supporters in recruitment and fundraising drives with online leaderboards. Users can also track top fundraisers or recruiters through leaderboards and reward them for their performances. The solution also helps to create custom paths to guide participants towards set goals through a series of steps or instructions.
NationBuilder can also be useful for brand managers in promoting their brand on various digital platforms. Organizations can conduct online campaigns or engage with end users through posts, tweets, emails or text messages and capture the sentiments and feedbacks from the overall campaign. The solution can also be used where users have to maintain customer database and focus on customer engagement.
Pros
*Powerful CRM for non-profits and political organizations
*Fantastic integration with social media.
*CRM is great at identifying prospective supporters among multiple mediums such as social network, email, and webpage
*Strong integrated communications tool that allows you to respond to engagements with your organization across multiple tools and automatically record your interactions within the individual user CRM profiles
*CRM has a good clean up tool that helps you merge fragmented prospect information into one complete profile if it was not done automatically already by this tool.
*Financial tool to track donation progress for your organization
Cons
*Overall tool feels restrictive and lacks some basic features
*UI is inefficient and not friendly to use and is intuitive only to people already in the development industry who may find this cumbersome. Menus in menus in menus.
*Support is mostly paid and seen as a key business driver for the organization other than development requests. This is a curious business decision considering the tools complexity and target market and likely leads to low retention rate among organizations who trial it. They are focused on tier 1 customers.
*Support for Events is very elementary. The tool is useful on small events only when tickets are involved, unless you want to use pen and paper check in's. There is no app support for check ins, no scannable tickets, and checking in requires a computer and many many clicks per person.
*Very restrictive HTML support that blocks external integrations and embedding on your web page. This seems to have been a business decision to encourage paid development in their business model.
*No native discussion/forum support is a key missed opportunity for engagement with the CRM. They have a work around with suggestion box but its sub standard and would make encouraging debate difficult as its not the core of its design.
*Email campaign support is very elementary and difficult to use and test. Support for external tools such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact is very limited. Mailchimp contact sync is availabe and thats all.
*Financial tool is missed opportunity due to lack of integration features with payment processors to import transactions and link them to people within CRM
*Membership tool is poorly designed and makes managing paid membership difficult as a fundraising option within this tool without manual input.
We were looking for an all-inclusive solution for our CRM and CMS needs at an affordable price. We looked at literally 200 solutions and decided that none were perfect but NationBuilder provided the best solution. We have been very happy with the choice and have been a customer for over 4 years.
Pros
We were looking for a fully featured, integrated CRM and CMS system that was easy to get up and running at a price that a very small non-profit organization could afford. We found that NationBuider has with very powerful tools to help drive our success. In addition, the customer support is outstanding...from the videos to the very accessible support team, they go way above and beyond the norm to make sure you are well taken care of.
Cons
Like any software, there are constant updates to comply with new regulations and requirements. Although NationBuilder does a good job of explaining the changes, it still requires work to keep up.
I have been using NationBuilder for a charity that I volunteer for now for about 8 months. At first I hated it because it seemed like it was very constricting but then I grew to like it. It includes a lot of features for organizations or groups who need a tool that includes everything in one place. It includes an email tool, your website, a crm and even social media measurement data for records. The reporting features and ways to pull people by tags can get sticky but overall I think they offer the future of what people need with this solution.
Pros
Everything is in one solution at one low price. You can have all of your donors, volunteers and staff all in one database and have it manage your website and communications at the same time.
Cons
Knowing what to do with the data can be tricky and sticky. Also training your staff on how to use NB is hard - there's a big learning curve and many don't know that there are unlimited uses for the system.
This was so easy to use. We hired one of their recommended deveopers, they built the website and truly it was flawless.
Pros
Customer Service is ALWAYS there to help you. Everything is easy to understand, of course there is a bit of a learning curve, the software is flawless.
Cons
Really it's hard to think of anything that doesn't work for us other than the pricing will be high for us as we grow.
The LPNC selected NationBuilder as our CRM of choice in mid-2013 and have been using it for two years now.
NationBuilder enables you to integrate your website, Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn account, and Meetup.com accounts'and e-mail and phone communications'for both incoming and outgoing communications'and, of course, record a history of these interactions. It also handles donation tracking, voter history, and relationships between your supporters'and can produce pertinent voter or contributor lists upon demand.
It is also possible to design a constellation of 'nations' and define what data to share between them. So, for example, the NC state Libertarian Party nation and the Wake County Libertarian Party nation share all contact information (e.g., phone and e-mail data) for individuals who reside in both databases, but not contact or donor history (except to identify who has contributed). Sharing is also possible with campaign nations (e.g. for particular candidates or issues).
Generally, functionality in NationBuilder for any particular activity is adequate or better. For example, you can send out an e-mail blast from NationBuilder to a list just as easily as in, say, MailChimp. MailChimp'being focused on e-mail management'affords you some useful analytics and other customization bells and whistles that the more utilitarian e-mail management NationBuilder lacks (e.g., MailChimp automatically provides you a breakdown of how often folks on your list have responded to your e-mail blasts, breaking the list down into five segments'those data are in NationBuilder but you would have to work at retrieving them). But on the other hand, the integration with the data NationBuilder provides enables you to perform tricks you cannot match with MailChimp (e.g., variables in the text of your e-mail message keyed to the last time someone voted or contributed or retweeted an LPNC tweet).
NationBuilder is an excellent CRM choice for multi-tiered political organizations that need to share data.
Monthly plans are based on database size and certain feature sets. All plans include unlimited team members and unlimited email blasts.
Leader: $29/month
Team: $199/month
Organization: Custom
• With NationBuilder, users can link their database contacts with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media platforms to broadcast messages and pull in social engagement activities.
• The solution supports scanning of documents through which users can scan various record sheets and minimize data entry time.
• The package includes 30 pre-built action page templates that can be customized to create sign-ups, petitions and donation pages.
• Users can segment voters geographically and create lists by visually segmenting supporters on a map for effective election campaigning.
• Users can bulk send emails to supporters and volunteers with pre-built themes or create their own one.
Below are some frequently asked questions for NationBuilder.
NationBuilder offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$29,00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
Monthly plans are based on database size and certain feature sets. All plans include unlimited team members and unlimited email blasts.
Leader: $29/month
Team: $199/month
Organization: Custom
NationBuilder offers the following features:
NationBuilder has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
NationBuilder supports the following languages:
English, French, Spanish
NationBuilder has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices NationBuilder supports
NationBuilder integrates with the following applications:
CallHub, Ecanvasser, Eventgrid, One Click Politics, Partic, Phone2Action, Revv, SharpSpring, Workato, iDONATEpro
NationBuilder offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
