Colin Delany @epolitics

Colin and I also discuss the philosophies in Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" and Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano," and how organizations, from advocacy non-profits to citizens groups like the Tea Party, turn their online networks into offline political influence.

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Liberal Art, the DC design firm behind sites like the California governor's JerryBrown.org and League of Conservation Voters's LCV.org has announced a new NationBuilder-powered offering that bring national-level design and implementation to mayoral and state-level campaigns and mid-sized nonprofits.

Now get Liberal Art's nat'l level experience on @NationBuilder in flat fee pkgs for advocacy & political sites: liberalart.com/nationbuilder

— steve ofner (@liberalart) January 6, 2012

"Social sharing functions are baked into every page, tool, and action taken by your supporters," Liberal Art writes. "With NationBuilder, we can deliver campaign sites with everything needed to build a community and effect change."

The new offering costs $4,950 for a premium design, and $8,750 with content, social media and email setup. This is less than half the cost of comparable projects on the Drupal content management system with actions tools from Blue State Digital, Salsa or Convio. Liberal Art explains why: NationBuilder's "tools are fully integrated into the CMS. This means less setup and easier management of your messaging and action campaigns."

It's now super easy to add stylized and interactive tweets to your blog posts. Twitter now supports grabbing an embed code from an individual tweet by clicking "Details" in the upper right of an individual tweet, then "embed this tweet" below the text of the tweet.

Stoked for the @nationbuilder webinar!

— Geoff Sharpe (@Geoff_Sharpe) January 5, 2012

To use the embed in one of your NationBuilder blog posts, just write your post and then click on the little blue HTML editor in your WYSIWYG content editor and paste the tweet code where you want it to appear in your post.

Check out more NationBuilder blogging tips in this screencast.

I just finished reviewing attributes of NationBuilder 2011 campaign customers, and the results are a huge validation of our vision: municipal candidates actively using NationBuilder won most of their races, and the average cost from their first bill through their election date for these grassroots candidates was only $234.

I looked at North American candidates who used custom domain names (e.g., "bobformayor.com") and represented our more active customers. Among this group of munipal candidates, NationBuilder customers won 77 percent of their elections. Their total costs for our election software and information services included voter data and outreach tools, websites, bulk emailing, and social media and volunteer and events management.

@TechCrunch http://tcrn.ch/gbL7zL @NationBuilder represents what great innovation can do for non-profits and campaigns

— Jeff McLean (@mclean) April 17, 2011

NationBuilder is a non-partisan community organizing platform and supports candidates across the political spectrum, as well as not-for-profit groups, businesses and others looking to grow community online. In 2011, it was used primarily in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Municipal candidates using NationBuilder ranged from a City Council hopeful in Provo, UT, to a first-time mayoral candidate in San Francisco. NationBuilder municipal office seekers came from the Green, Democratic and Republican parties, and also included independents. In addition to municipal candidates, NationBuilder is used by national and state parties, large unions and candidates at the state and federal levels, including presidential candidates in the U.S. and Kenya.

Based on popular demand, I'll be hosting another free live webinar this Thursday, at 3:30 p.m. EST, 12:30 Pacific. Sign up here, as space is limited.

Your feedback says that custom theming guidance is a big need, so be sure to check out Jesse's new in-depth screencast on working with NationBuilder templates. My webinar will be more basic - plus a look at some fun new features like the Focus official theme, "no code" customizable site headers, and our duplicate person finder. The full agenda is on the signup.

If you can't make this one, don't fret - training webinars of various types will be a staple for NationBuilder customers in 2012. Our next one will feature a panel of our great consultants sharing their favorite tips and tricks for organizing success.

Hope everyone's new year is off to a great start!

As we close out the year here at NationBuilder, we've got a great gift for you from the workshop of ace designer Jesse Haff. The new "Focus" theme is free for our customers as one of our official templates, and features a full-screen background image of your choosing.

Jesse also went to town on the date and reactions text and links for blog posts in Focus, calling them out prominently in each post as graphic elements (right).

To try out the new theme in your nation, go to your control panel and Pages/Sites > Theme > Switch theme > Official themes > Focus. To change out the background image, it's Pages/Sites > Settings > Background images. Images around 1024 x 768 pixels will work best. If you don't yet have a nation, start your 14-day free trial here. We've also made it much easier to 

We spent a lot of time at last weeks' NationBuilder Summit in LA thinking up great features for you, and Focus is an early glimpse at the type of goodness we've got planned for you in 2012. We're kinda crazy about it ourselves and have been trying it out all over the place.

I first met Nathan Henderson-James in his role as an advisor to some of NationBuilder's early advocacy customers. Over the past year, I've met and talked to organizers across the U.S. who trust Nathan for his level head and deep historical knowledge of labor and community organizing. In today's "Leaders and Creators," Nathan talks about his inspirations - a grandfather rooted in radical union movements, activists parents who participated in Students for a Democratic Society, and an awe for the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. He also shares about his career with ACORN, the controversial organizing behemoth that imploded in 2010. 

Nathan's experience with the growth and crash of ACORN offers lessons for advocacy groups seeking to expand their influence - deal quickly and openly with any employee malfeasance, and acknowledge that expansion requires more structure. Anything less leaves you extremely vulnerable to external pressures.

He also describes the basis for organizing from the ground up and teaching people to directly confront those with the power to improve their living conditions.

I also talked with Nathan about my direct experiences with Occupy protesters. How do protestors and politicians fit into the "99%" framework? "We have to have a conversation about elections and government; if you're categorically against having anything to do with (politicians) you have to have some other way of influencing the public policy realm." 

Nathan Henderson-James @nathanhjb

Nathan closed by offering his personal thoughts on what can be changed in the U.S. by the Occupy movement. His basic message: keep Wall Street in the bullseye. "We can't have an honest conversation about dealing with wealth inequality - which means dealing with the economy, fundamentally - without first dealing with the problem of what to do with Wall Street and Wall Street banks."

Finally, my apologies for the choppy quality of the recording. It's been quite busy at NationBuilder, and my conversation with Nathan was recorded in a hallway at Pace University during Netroots NY. Hang in there - we've got some great plans for Leaders and Creators, and we look forward to being back with you in the new year.

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Kirk J. Torrance is one of the digital strategists who helped lead the Scottish National Party to its most sweeping victory in history this past spring. Newspapers in the U.K. called the SNP's win a "Facebook revolution." 

On "Leaders and Creators," Kirk explains that his plan for the parliamentary elections started with a message he wrote on his bathroom mirror - "SNP Everywhere." The roll out included a digital organizer with each SNP candidate and twice-daily conference calls to discuss the campaign's social media messaging. 

Kirk's background includes education in how to monetize technology innovation, which he now uses to turn tech innovation into votes and political muscle. After leaving a job in the Los Angeles film industry to help the SNP take power in Scotland, he's recently founded Industrial New Media and is working on a referendum to restore Scottish sovereignty for the first time in 300 years.

Kirk J. Torrance @kirkjtorrance

Political organizing online will also impact the future of social media itself, Kirk says, with individuals developing a kind of collective consciousness that means, "revolutions will take place very rapidly online."

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He's been called "The worst person in the world" by Keith Olbermann; he's opening a new office in San Francisco, and he's got a "man blog" that mixes Sunday School, Pulp Fiction and whiskey reviews.

In the latest episode of NationBuilder's Leaders and Creators, I talk with South Carolina political operative Wesley Donehue about the GOP presidential field, his start in organizing as a 13 year old on public assistance, and his experience defending Rep. Joe Wilson after the 2009 "You lie!" incident during a presidential speech to a joint session of Congress.

Wesley Donehue @wesleydonehue

Donehue also talks about social media in politics, using Nancy Pelosi as a liberal caricature, and what he likes about San Francisco.

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