Lilia Villa is NationBuilder's Email Delivery Manager.

Designing an email template is not like building for the web. Each email provider receiving your messages has their own set of HTML standards and idiosyncrasies that tend to be behind the times. Knowing how to build an email template so that you meet the requirements of all of them and get past their spam filters can be a project.

NationBuilder comes equipped with a nice set of optimized email themes to choose from, but also gives you complete freedom to customize your email template or build one entirely from scratch.

Below are a few tips to optimize your custom email themes for best deliverability.

Food Revolution Day at NationBuilder

The food revolution to keep cooking skills alive is being celebrated today, May 17. This is the second annual day, with events occurring around the world. From the Food Revolution Day website:

It's a chance for people to come together within their homes, schools, workplaces and communities to cook and share their kitchen skills, food knowledge and resources.

Food Revolution Day is open to any individual, school, business and organisation that wants to take part in hosting or attending activities in their local area on 17 May.

Inspired by Jamie Oliver's passion for engaging communities in cooking and food knowledge, over a thousand events are planned. The NationBuilder staff is excited to be a part of this day: we're having a smoothie party this morning, which will give us time to share tips on incorporating cooking and healthy eating into a hectic day.

Here's what Food Revolution Day means to me:

So you want a page full of all those gorgeous images you add to your Tumblr? Good news! It's pretty easy to embed your Tumblr stream onto a NationBuilder page!

Check out Adriel's snazzy Tumblr stream on his Adriel Nation site:

For any campaign, business, nonprofit, or creative venture it's important to keep in contact with your most vocal supporters. With mailboxes and virtual phone numbers, NationBuilder makes it easy for you by routing your calls and emails to just the right person. 

Listening is crucial. So say goodbye to noreply@ emails by setting up mailboxes in your nation. NationBuilder Mailboxes help create custom workflows with any email system. General email address like info@, jobs@, and volunteer@ can be managed by multiple staff members from within NationBuilder. In this video C.J. walks you through how to set it up mailboxes:

You can watch How to set up a NationBuilder Mailbox in HD for better quality on the NationBuilder YouTube page. 

Still want more information? Check out our step-by-step how to on setting up your NationBuilder Mailboxes.

Last week, I attended the Center for Nonprofit Management’s 501(c)onference. I enjoyed meeting others who care about their communities and are interested in using organizing strategies to achieve their mission. Putting people first was the overall theme of the conference. This is actually at the core of what we're doing at NationBuilder so the synergy was amazing. 

How to put people first

Here are my takeaways from the conference on how you can put people first in your organization:

1. The people connected to your organization create your power - even more than money!
2. Find people who are passionate about your cause and utilize that passion.
3. If the funding for your nonprofit grows, first invest in your current employees. By helping them grow, you’ll reinforce their passion for your cause and help your organization move forward. Long-term, this is a more sustainable model than hiring “senior” employees to oversee new projects.
4. Ask a large for-profit organization if you can join them for a corporate coaching day. Leadership and management skills are transferable between sectors.
5. Look for organizing trainings that are available for free online.
6. Consider investing in capacity-building trainings at your organization. Trainings can provide a safe-space where employees feel free to brainstorm innovative ideas that can help your nonprofit reach the next level of effectiveness and engagement.

Custom fields have long been one of your most requested features, particularly from larger organizations who want to use NationBuilder to unify their existing mess of databases, spreadsheets and websites into one platform.

The wait is over! Custom fields are here.

I probably don't even need to explain what custom fields are, because it's such a common feature in other web applications. Here's a video showing how it works in NationBuilder.

Custom fields are part of our Enterprise edition, which also includes subnations. 

Subnations allow you to give chapters, groups or others affiliated with your nation their own nation with all the organizing power of NationBuilder, while still capturing the basic information about the supporters they bring in. 

To try out the Enterprise edition, just drop us an email or contact your point person.

Climate change expert Andrew Weaver made history last night as the first Green Party member to be elected to the British Columbia legislature. Weaver won in a competitive three-way race that saw the incumbent lose her seat.

Both Weaver and the BC Greens used NationBuilder to organize this cycle.

Two years ago, NationBuilder alpha customer Alex Torpey became Village President of South Orange, NJ. Inc. magazine dubbed the 23-year-old independent "The Social Media" mayor and the win propelled the social media consultant into national prominence in the open government movement. It also made our team really happy. 

Tonight, young leaders in South Orange again triumphed with NationBuilder, as the Torpey-backed slate of Sheena Collum, Stephen Schnall and Walter Clarke swept the Village Trustee election for four year terms.

On tonight's win, a huge thx to all our supporters & vols. Of course the voters. And I shouldn't leave out the good folks at @nationbuilder

— Jonah Wolff (@jwolffnj) May 15, 2013

You can create dozens of different types of pages on your nation's website, including blogs, petitions, donation pages, and volunteer sign up forms. How do you hook people into your organization so they'll interact with all of those community-building features? Using compelling images and clear copy is key.

In this clip from a recent episode of NationBuilder Live, VP of Community Adriel Hampton walks through the Australian Road Trip to End Poverty website to show how the combination of compelling images and a clear call to action encourage engagement.

You can also watch "Compelling images and clear calls to action" in high definition on the NationBuilder YouTube channel.

Summarizing your organization's mission with a landing page is a great tool for use with paid search and Facebook ad campaigns, and can also help you develop better splash pages for your site.

You can choose from dozens of different free designs for your website and hundreds of styles. We know sometimes you want to tweak the color palette of your website, which is why you can create a custom theme that includes all of the elements in a public theme.

In this video from NationBuilder Live, Adriel Hampton explains how to do some basic theme modification in NationBuilder. In this case, he shows you how to adjust the color of headlines by overriding the CSS in one of our public themes. 

You can also watch "Customizing your NationBuilder website" in high definition on our YouTube channel.

In Mississippi's democratic primary on Tuesday, attorney Melvin Priester won the Jackson city council seat of outgoing Councilman Chokwe Lumumba who left to pursue a bid for mayor. A Jackson native and first time candidate, Priester won a decisive victory with 65 percent of the votes; his next closest competitor received 16 percent. 

Jonathan Priester, who lead the candidate's communications team, had this to say about using NationBuilder for the campaign: "I know for a fact that NationBuilder played an incredibly important role in not only helping to raise awareness about our candidate, but also served as a lynchpin for our fundraising and email efforts." They used one of NationBuilder's free public themes - Tectonica's "Victory" - for the campaign's website. 

The candidate and his team plan to continue to use NationBuilder for their work in the city council office. 

Lilia Villa is NationBuilder's Email Delivery Manager. 

Social networks come and go, but what has always remained constant is email. In 2010 the number of emails sent was 107 trillion, up 19% from 2009. Not only was email the most popular online activity of 2012, but by the end of the year, there were 3.3 billion registered email accounts.

Currently, the average user sends and receives about 115 emails per day. With all of that email action you have to wonder: "Will my emails get delivered or even read?" The only way to make sure you’re set up for success is to follow email best practices right from the start, and not suck at email deliverability.

A few weeks ago I ran into a funny post giving advice about 10 ways to suck at email deliverability. Here's my take on how not to suck at it:

Chelsea Staley and her husband, Mark, love dogs. They have more than 10 - six permanent and four rescue - at their 20 acre home in Charleston, West Virginia. When they adopted their first puppy, he was so ill that he didn't even make it home from the shelter. It was that moment when Chelsea knew she needed to do something more.

She and Mark started Dog Bless, an all-volunteer organization whose mission is to save dogs from euthanasia at their local animal shelter in West Virginia. Since they started the organization just one year ago, Dog Bless has rescued 568 dogs!

Have you ever wondered why Facebook is blue? It turns out there's a a good reason. Last week, Leo Widrich explained in Fast Company that Mark Zuckerberg's red-green color blindness makes blue the color he sees best. That's why blue was chosen for Facebook. The article provides additional insights on the "meaning" of color in marketing materials, including which colors appeal to women and which appeal to men.

Reading about perceptions of color is interesting, but at the end of the day color is subjective. As Dan Lundmark points out on Quora, 7-10 percent of men and 0.4 percent of women find the colors red and green difficult to recognize, making color blindness a significant issue. 

People from different cultures also perceive color differently. For example, in Chinese culture red is a color of fortune and joy, the primary color of weddings. White is associated with death and mourning. According to KISSmetrics, women hate orange yet it's one of my favorite colors. 

Widrich used a portion of the KISSmetric graphic below in his article, though he left out the caveat from the original: color preferences are not universal. Their 2010 version describes these color and consumer profiles:

There are many color options available for buttons and other design elements in NationBuilder public themes. With a bit of work in HTML and CSS, you can add a custom button in any color. 

While the NationBuilder scheduling feature can be used on a one-off basis to make sure your email is delivered in the early morning or to publish a blog post when more people are awake, it is truly powerful when integrated into a larger content strategy.

5 Steps for Content Planning

1. Develop an editorial calendar
2. Create content
3. Schedule your content
4. Make time to respond to the news
5. Turn off scheduled content during major crises

These five steps will ensure you deliver content on a consistent basis that engages people with your mission.