NationBuilder provides political campaign subscribers in most U.S. states free access to national voter records through a partnership with PoliticalFORCE (for more than 2 million records, contact us for VIP setup pricing). However, many campaigns also want to import their local voter files or international voter information. Often, Excel and similar programs will want to automatically re-format your data, so here are some tips for normalizing your CSV files for clean imports.

Because of the dizzying array of voter data formats around the world, our voter file importer (available with the campaign edition and accessed under People>Imports) supports a large number of fields. (Here is the complete list of supported fields for standard imports, all of which are included in the voter file import.)

.CSV imports are limited to 20mb per file - if your list is larger than that, you will need to divide it into multiple files.

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

• state_file_id = this is going to be your generic voter ID from the state elections authority
• county_file_id = this is the voter ID as reported by the county (you should have either the state or county fields set)
• registered_at = the date a person first registered to vote
• email = this field is very important because it's one of the primary ways NationBuilder deduplicates records
• email_opt_in = a yes/no, 1/0 or true/false field - all of those formats are supported
• name = for records where a full name is in one column
• born_at = This should be the voter's birthdate
• mobile_opt_in = primarily for text blasting (U.S.-only through NationBuilder). It is a yes/no, 1/0, true/false field
• created_at = date the original record was created
• support_level = a number from 1 to 5, with 1 being support, 5 being oppose, and 3 being swing
• is_volunteer = another yes/no, 1/0, true/false field
• note = you can import text notes attached to people in your database
• demo = demographic codes (U.S. codes here)
• tag_list = import a list of tags for your voters, separated by commas
• assistant_id = this would be the NationBuilder ID of another person in you database
• recruiter_id = the NationBuilder ID of a person who recruited a new voter or supporter
• point_person_id = assign a point person for new people using this field and the NationBuilder ID
• nationbuilder_id = a unique number assigned for each person in your nation. It is not connected to NationBuilder.com or any other nation
• facebook_uid = the unique Facebook ID for each of that platform's users
• twitter_login = the username for a Twitter member
• twitter_id = a unique number assigned to each Twitter member in some Twitter data sources
• meetup_id = the user ID for Meetup.com members. NationBuilder's social media integration is tightest with Twitter, Facebook and Meetup
• civicrm_id = a database ID used by many Drupal projects
• 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
• registered_address1 = generally a voter'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.
• registered_fips = a geographic code that may be attached to some voter data
• registered_precinct_name = the primary name for a precinct, it could be a number or a word
• registered_precinct_code = some voting districts have a secondard princinct ID, such as "Lincoln 001, Lincoln 002 and Lincoln 003." This column supports such districts
• registered_country_code = a country abbreviation, like US or CA
• registered_sort_sequence = if you're uploading and working on files for later mail merge use, you'll want to include this and other mailing data headers for later export and use

When you add a new name to the database through something like "assistant_name_or_email," or through an import of donor records, NationBuilder will automatically create a new person based on that information.

It's important to note that while these fields will all become part of your database, they are not all editable after an import. Putting the cleanest, most complete data possible into your nation will help your advances searches, social media integration, turft cutting and more.

If you have any questions or need help, drop us an email. We can also do imports for you for a fee of $500 per file.