What is a "private note" in the people dashboard?

Official response from Adriel Hampton

In the NationBuilder dashboard, you can post notes about people that are private to your organization. They can be viewed only in the dashboard, by those with intern access and up. You can use them to remind yourself of follow-up items, provide background information on a prospect or for just about anything.

What is the difference between Broadcasters, Supporters, Prospects, and Non-Supporters?

Official response from Lilia Villa

Broadcasters:  the voices of your nation. They can be your organization, yourself, your staff, or anyone else you want interacting with your supporters. You can set up multiple broadcasters and the communications of each broadcaster are managed and tracked from their individual dashboards under the Messages tab. Broadcasters are different than the people in your database, and they do not have person records. You can allow all people with control panel level permissions to access and communicate as a broadcaster, or limit them to only a single person. All outgoing communications from your nation go through a broadcaster. They can send email and text blasts, and can receive text messages and voicemails.

This video from NationBuilder Live walks you through the communication features associated with a broadcaster:

The "Communications and broadcasters" video is also available in high definition on our YouTube channel.

Primary Broadcaster: When you go to Websites > [Website Name] > Site settings, you will see a place there for specifying a broadcaster.  That determines what Facebook page, Twitter account, and who the main email auto-responses in your nation come from. The broadcaster chosen must have an email account associated with it. 

In this video from NationBuilder Live, C.J. explains the difference between supporters, prospects and non-supporters. 

Supporters: your nation’s advocates and opt-ins for messaging. People are automatically added as a supporter when they subscribe to your email updates, follow you on Twitter, donate/volunteer on the website, or choose to receive text messages. Twitter followers are included because you are able to use direct message functionality to start one-to-one communication with them.  

Prospects: people you have to convince before you can gain their support and convert them into advocates and opt-ins. In a political campaign, prospects would be your potential voters. People are automatically added to your nation as prospects when they mention your broadcaster on Twitter, retweet your broadcaster or like a post on your Facebook Page. Be exceedingly careful in contacting prospects via any kind mass email - here are some tips for conducting outreach without spamming.

Non-Supporters: people who do not want to receive emails from you and haven’t taken any action. They are in your database because they have unsubscribed or have tweeted about you but are not following you. 

What fields are retained when deduplicating records?

Official response from Adriel Hampton

The record being merged into will retain all the information that is already in it.

If the duplicate record has additional information (such as a birthday, email, or social media account), that information will be added to the merged into record. Addresses and other duplicative information from the second record will be overwritten by the information in the master record.