Build a long-term strategy for your political party
Election day is the moment when years of work are put to the test. You need a secure, reliable technology infrastructure that’s powerful enough to manage your data, communicate with your base, and identify new voters – so you can build your long-term strategic advantage.
The 2008 and 2012 elections proved the power of locally organized grassroots engagement, but the tools cost millions of dollars to custom build. Now, your party can rely on – and afford – the same platform trusted by dozens of political parties worldwide.
Your advantage? People. You need good volunteer, donor, and voter data, and you need it all in one place – not in thousands of spreadsheets scattered across hundreds of staffers in three different time zones. With NationBuilder, you’ll share powerful and secure data capture and communications tools with every candidate and campaign.
Campaigns and elections come and go – but your party is forever. And with NationBuilder, so is your data.
Political parties using NationBuilder
1. Start your nation
Set up the foundation of your new site by selecting a public theme, editable without any need for HTML or other coding expertise. While creating a beautiful site is easy with basic themes, templates are fully customizable for web designers as well. Either way, you've got the base for a fully integrated web and data system. Next, connect your party's Twitter handle and Facebook page to a broadcaster, and NationBuilder will import your social media community so you can track how they're interacting with you. Finally, you'll be able to activate a free phone number for tracking calls, call-forwarding, and especially for text keywords and blasts.
2. Import your data
Email lists, volunteer databases, event hosting sites, old paper sign-in sheets (!!!), donor information. With NationBuilder, they don't have to live in separate systems. Instead of creating duplicates across the board, NationBuilder's importer will match records based on email addresses and other unique identifiers, so you can append supporter information from multiple lists to a single profile. Using email addresses, NationBuilder Match will also comb the public social media profiles of your supporters, appending information from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Klout into their profiles.
3. Build your voter file
Free access to the voter file will provide your organization with the foundation it needs to target voter outreach and cultivate your own deeply developed voter file - all integrated with your supporter data and appends from any source.
4. Prepare to accept donations and set up email
Connect your payment processor to begin accepting donations from your supporters. Then connect your broadcasters to email addresses to prepare for one-to-one and blast email communication.
5. Make action easy
Use the site to collect new and enrich current supporter information, run surveys, host events, keep party members up to date, and simplify the actions they take.
- Host events
- Recruit volunteers
- Accept donations
- Launch petitions
6. Empower your local candidates and party units
By now you've got everything in place to let your county party function like a state party. You have the power to bring that infrastructure to your local candidates. Activating Enterprise Edition will allow any of your endorsed candidates to create their own separate nation while still gaining access to website themes, page templates, lists, supporters, donors, volunteers, voter information, and tags that you choose to share with them. Repeat this every cycle: last year it was school board, this cycle it's city council, next cycle it's county commission, burgess, township board, or anything else. By providing the local candidates with their own nations, you can give your endorsed candidates the confidence they need to maximize their campaign.
7. Identify the influencers and empower them
By simply taking actions, all supporters have the power to recruit other supporters. What's more, every time someone RSVPs, comments on your Facebook page, donates, recruits new volunteers, or takes another action, they can gain "points" via the powerful, customizable "political capital" system, allowing you to quickly identify who is making the biggest impact. You can also sort lists by Klout Score or Twitter followers, giving you the ability to quickly identify and empower your most influential supporters.