NationBuilder's pricing model is built around subscriptions, and we do not have an extra fee for taking online donations. We support several payment processors, each of which have their own fee models.

To set up a new account, go to your control panel and Settings > Bank accounts > New account. Here are your choices:

Democracy Engine

Democracy Engine is a donation processor that integrates seamlessly with NationBuilder for any U.S.-based recipient (unfortunately it does not handle international recipients at this time). There are no set-up fees for Democracy Engine and the processing fee is a flat 3.75% plus $0.20/transaction. No merchant account is required and set-up usually takes a single business day. Funds are transferred weekly by check and special transfers due to campaign finance and other filing deadlines can be accommodated. For more information about Democracy Engine, you can reach them at info@democracyengine.com.

PayPal

NationBuilder donation pages are secure and use state of the industry encryption technology. You will know you are on a secure donation page when you see "https" at the start of the URL. 

If you see an error on the security of your custom donation page, it is either because you are using photos hosted in insecure locations, or template code that is not secure, such as external "share" widgets. To secure your custom images, host them in the Files section of your donation page. And if you have site-wide widgets that are not secure, you can suppress them from your donation page by using this code in your template:

{% if request.is_ssl? %}
{% else %}
code goes here
{% endif %}

To connect your bank account from within the NationBuilder control panel, go to settings > bank accounts.

You have multiple options when it comes to getting your bank account hooked up, and we will continue to add more. Go to new account to choose from a list of payment processors that currently work with NationBuilder.

If you don't already have a payment processor and you are in the U.S. the easiest way to go is with Democracy Engine, which lets you enter all of your information and create an account with them right from the control panel. Democracy Engine is really good when it comes to processing donations for campaigns because they'll get you your money faster, and you won't have any problems when you receive an influx of donations at the end of your campaign. They charge 3.75% on every donation + a 20 cent transaction fee. 

Other payment processors are easy to set up as well, but they require you to create a merchant account, which you will have to get from your bank. Then you need to go to the individual payment processor's website and set up your account; for most you will need a login, api transaction key, and partner code for third parties. Once you select your third party payment processor in the control panel, enter the necessary information in order to get going.

If you want to use the recurring donation feature of paid memberships, you will need to use PayPal for that functionality.

You can set up as many payment processors and bank accounts as you want.

If all of this seems way too confusing or if you are currently working with a different payment processor and think we should support it, please contact us.

NationBuilder allows you to customize the disclaimer that donors to your campaign sign before they can process a credit card transaction. We support collection of home and work addresses, and you can import and export data-rich CSV files from the "Finances" dashboard. To export a detailed spreadsheet on your donations, go to finances>donations>export. In your exports, "FEC Type" is the column for specifying individual contributions and that sort of thing. You can export all your donations into a spreadsheet and sort by that field. You also have the ability to edit and post notes on contributions - such as refunded amounts or donations made by spouses - and those notes will be included on your export.

Yes. NationBuilder’s donation pages are 100% secure. We don’t store anyone’s credit card information in our systems or databases either. We use CVV codes as an extra precaution, but using them is optional. 

When you are setting up your donation page, under Donation settings, make sure that the box that reads Show the most recent public donation on the page is unchecked to keep your donations private. 

Checking that box will enable your donors to choose whether or not they want their donation to be public. NationBuilder will never show the dollar amount of the donation no matter what.

Yes. NationBuilder supports multiple donation pages and separate bank accounts, where you can clearly mark whether a donation is tax deductible or not. NationBuilder also allows you to create separate public web sites on a single database, and to use database tags to denote whether a supporter is part of your c3 or c4. You can then run queries on those tags to see how many of the people in your database are within each type of organization.

If your legal department insists that your databases must be totally separate, you can use multiple NationBuilder accounts, but it is within standard non-profit practices to segment IDs within a single database. If we can be of help on this issue, please let us know.

You can set goals for your online donation page, which will put a progress bar on the page. If you want an offline donation to count towards a fundraising goal set for a particular page, go to the EDIT tab for the off-line donation and in the field that reads "Page this donation was from" enter the slug for the page. Now that donation will count towards that page's fundraising goal and increase the progress bar accordingly. 

Under Finances > Donations > Import, you can upload CSV formatted records of donor history. Consider that donations you import will go into your dashboard finance totals, and be aware that Excel has a habit of automatically changing values in fields based on format. Exercising care in normalizing your data will give you the best results with NationBuilder. 

With our donation importer, any person or business who isn't already in your database will be added as a new person, and donation records will be merged automatically with existing people records where possible. Because there are many different donation tracking formats around the world, we support a large number of fields. Consider using notes and adding tags to the import if you have data that doesn't meet one of our primary fields, and please do not use fields for data that they are not designed for, or you will run into problems down the line. If you think we are missing a critical field, please let us know by emailing help@nationbuilder.com or adding it to our suggestions page. 

Here's a cheat sheet to some of the frequently used and important data headers that aren't as obvious:

• nationbuilder_donation_id = NationBuilder's ID for your donation, only relevant if the data originally came from NationBuilder
• amount = donation total with decimal point ($1 = 1.00)
• amount_in_cents = donation total without decimal point ($1 = 100) - you only need one of these, amount or amount_in_cents
• authorization = a processing code from the transaction provider
• ngp_id = supports deduplication of records imported from NGP VAN files
• actblue_order_numberelection_cycle = supports ActBlue donation ID numbers
• election_period_name = Primary, General, Special, Recount, Runoff, Convention, Previous Campaign, or Other
• election_period_id = internal to NationBuilder
• payment_type_name = Cash, Credit Card, Check, Money Order, EFT, In-Kind, Wire Transfer, Square, ActBlue, Other
• payment_type_id = internal to NationBuilder
• fec_type_name = Contribution, Exempt Legal Expense, offsets, Debt Owed to Committee, Interest, Loan, Loan from Candidate, Transfer, Other
• fec_type_id = this is a NationBuilder reference that is important to our system but you won't genererally need to worry about it
• currency = support for non-U.S. currency types: USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, JPY, NZD
• succeeded_at = date and time when donation was received (MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS)
• created_at = date and time record was imported (MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS)
• is_private = keeps the donation record off of the public site, a yes/no, 1/0, true/false field
• ip_address = useful for fundraising source audit trails
• note = free text field for notes about the donation
• page_slug = internal to NationBuilder, denotes what page the donation was made from
• recuriter_id = the NationBuilder ID for the person who brought in the donor
• recruiter_name_or_email = supports linking the donor and donation to a recruiter
• tracking_code_slug = use your own tracking codes for donation source, etc.
• signup_email = this field is very important because it's one of the primary ways NationBuilder deduplicates records
• signup_email_opt_in = a yes/no, 1/0 or true/false field - all of those formats are supported
• signup_name = for records where a full name is in one column
• signup_born_at = This should be the voter's birthdate
• signup_mobile_opt_in = primarily for text blasting (U.S.-only through NationBuilder). It is a yes/no, 1/0, true/false field
• signup_created_at = date the original record was created
• signup_support_level = a number from 1 to 5, with 1 being support, 5 being oppose, and 3 being swing
• signup_membership_level_name = type of membership level
• signup_is_volunteer = another yes/no, 1/0, true/false field
• signup_is_fundraiser = denotes that they have given or solicited donations for your campaign
• signup_note = free-text field for text notes attached to people or businesses
• signup_demo = demographic codes (U.S. codes here)
• signup_assistant_id = this would be the NationBuilder ID of another person in you database
• signup_recruiter_id = the NationBuilder ID of a person who recruited a new voter or supporter
• signup_point_person_id = assign a point person for new people using this field and the NationBuilder ID
• signup_nationbuilder_id = a unique number assigned for each person in your nation. It is not connected to NationBuilder.com or any other nation
• signup_facebook_uid = the unique Facebook ID for each of that platform's users; NationBuilder will automatically dedupe on these and other unique IDs from supported social networks
• signup_twitter_login = the username for a Twitter member
• signup_twitter_id = a unique number assigned to each Twitter member in some Twitter data sources
• signup_meetup_id = the user ID for Meetup.com members. NationBuilder's social media integration is tightest with Twitter, Facebook and Meetup
• signup_civicrm_id = a database ID used by many Drupal projects
• signup_external_id = a generic ID for use when you may be commonly uploading, modifying and merging files that need a unique identifier not already supported by NationBuilder; it might be something like a national ID or passport number
• address1 = generally a donor's primary address. You can include things like street number, street name and things like "NW" and "Blvd" and NationBuilder will parse them. NationBuilder supporters multiple addresses and address types, but you do not want to use this field if your data is already divided into seperate columns for street number, street name, etc.
• fips = a geographic code that may be attached to some voter data
• country_code = a country abbreviation, like US or CA

If you have any questions or need help, drop us an email. We can also do imports for you for a fee of $100 per file.

Use recruiter_id (for NationBuilder ID number if known) or recruiter_name_or_email field in the donation import. Just set the recruiter, that is who fundraised for it, and it will be attached directly to the donation.

Federal elections and many other jurisdictions allow maximum donations per election, which means an individual can max out in both the primary and general. With NationBuilder, you can set up election cycles and maximums (under Settings > Campaign with the political edition of NationBuilder) and NationBuiler will automatically split a donation over the primary limit into a primary and general contribution.