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.

What dimensions should my custom theme use?

Official response from Adriel Hampton

You can customize the widths, paddings and margins of your custom theme. However, in a two column layout, the left column should have a minimum of 660px, as several elements (such as video embeds) expect that width to populate properly.

As a reference, the official themes use a width of 960px. The left column is 660px and the right column is usually 240px. Generally there is 15px of padding on both sides of both columns, but this can vary a bit from theme to theme. You can also disable the sidebar on any page so it uses full width.

The custom theme documentation and object reference guide, available in the right column of your custom theme page in the control panel, will provide many other helpful details as you build your custom theme.

What are the recommended image sizes for my logo, featured content sliders, header image, and background photo?

Official response from Adriel Hampton

Logo:
140px width by 140px height (NationBuilder will automatically resize a photo down to these proportions upon image upload. Just make sure the image is a square.)

Featured Content Sliders:
660px-960px width by 250px height (660px if in the left column, anywhere between 660px to 960px if the slider spans the entire page width)

Header Image (banner):
960px width by 150px height (learn more about resizing your header image)

Background image for Focus theme:
1024px width by 768px height

Recommended image sizes are different for the Busy Biz, Civitas, and Victory themes. Learn more about these themes on our public theme guidelines page.

Note: the pixel dimensions listed above assume changes have not been made to the template widths of $page_width, $left_column_width, and $right_column_width in theme.scss. Your can disregard this note if you aren't using a custom theme.

What is a unique identifier?

Official response from Adriel Hampton

Unique identifiers (IDs) are profile fields that may not occur in more than one profile within a nation. Unique IDs are used to merge information from imports with records already existing in the nation and for deduping records in your nation.

A person's profile in NationBuilder has several options for unique IDs:

• email address
• facebook_uid
• twitter_ID
• meetup_ID
• civicrm_ID
• external_ID
• nationbuilder_ID

The best unique ID on an import is an email address. If you do not have an email address for a specific person, you may use one or more of the other unique IDs. However, the other unique IDs must have a first name and last name mapped during the import in order for the signup record to be imported into the nation.

Once the import has finished newly imported people in the nation will have a nationbuilder_ID assigned to them.

There will be times when there isn't anything the importer recognizes as unique on import. In this case, you can create a unique ID for each record. 

• Open the CSV file in Excel
• Insert a new column to the left of the existing columns
• Name that column "NationBuilder_ID"
• Leave the rest of the column blank
• Save the CSV file
• Import your file mapping the new column to "nationbuilder_ID" (for one time and voter imports) or  "signup_nationbuilder_ID" (for donation imports)

If an attempt is made to import a person whose unique ID(s) already exist in the nation, NationBuilder will update the existing profile with the information from the import file instead of creating a new profile.

Voter Imports

Voters in your nation may have one or more of these unique IDs:

• NBEC_guid
• state_file_id
• county_file_id
• DW_ID (also known as Catalyst ID)
• VAN_ID

Donation Imports

Donations have their own unique ID (donation_nationbuilder_id) along with one of the unique ID so NationBuilder knows who the donation belongs to. Donation imports connect the donor to the donation via the same fields used for a one time import. However, here is a slight difference for donations: each of these fields begins with "signup_".