Ok, so here is a followup.

I got a phone call from Nation Builder after posting my snarky post. They understood where I was coming from and answered my question with all the details I needed in order to make an informed decision. They were also quite nice, and could deal with questions from both technical and non-technical users.

Now, back to my original lack of an answer- multi-site add-on users’ resources will be part of the Nation that they signed on as being “part of”. Basically, any resources (volunteers or otherwise), are going to be part of the Nation. Say, you run the national raving loony monster party (a real political party, actually), and someone signs on as a multi-site user for the MN raving loony monster party, all of MN’s resources that they add can be ‘tagged’ as MN’s, but can be used by the national party, and by the FL multi-site users as well. Essentially, any multi-site user will probably need staff privileges if they want to continue operating their own discrete campaigns under the larger “nation”.

So, if you want to maintain (or have to for FEC purposes) discrete separation of resources from a parent org, having separate accounts might be better. If that is not an issue, or you are part of a very unified campaign that doesn’t have a lot of separation to do by locality (charity fun runs, etc), then multi-site would probably work better.

Many thanks to the kind man on the phone who helped answer those questions for me, even when I was being snarky. I’d say if you don’t have full time IT resources (volunteer or paid), these folks would be the ones to go with for campaign based CRMs. ;)

Seems that my original response was consumed by the system requiring me to log in as a new user in order to post (and from a UI perspective, that “Post your comment” field probably should have been grayed out if I wasn’t logged in).

Now regarding FAQ feedback on this answer here. Could the response be any more obtusely recursive? Obviously, providing the same answer as was what spawned the FAQ is probably not the best way to explain something that isn’t cleared up by saying “pay me money, its kewl, you’ll love it”. This doesn’t explain it on a non-technical level (which NationBuilder caters to), and this definitely doesn’t suffice on a technical level (within which I reside). Does this work as a form of multi-tenancy? Where are the dividing lines for sub-organizations? Who controls the flow of the data? Who controls what is posted on each “website”? How is payment handled from sub-tenants on one of those multiple sites? Is the sub-tenant’s data separate in any way? Can the sub-tenants be disabled for non-payment? How are disputes handled? How is fund raising divvied up between bank accounts? How are volunteer resources identified and separated? Ironically, someone is probably going to pick this up, toddle off, get each question answered individually, and not understand at all how this ties together as a theme, thereby invalidating their whole effort. Yes, that is a challenge to someone to actually answer this question well.

And how do I know this is a challenge? Have a look at the Sys Admin’s face on the NationBuilder staff page, and tell me I’m wrong.