Action Network is an organizing toolkit, designed to create advocacy tool widgets, including events, fundraisers, letter writing campaigns, and forms, as well as mass email. The platform provides widgets to connect with your website, but CMS functionality is not included. That means organizations must build and maintain their own website in addition to Action Network. Many customers also require a separate, full-function CRM (or database) to track their supporters and donors long-term. Connecting this to Action Network and your stand alone website requires a lot of integration work, in order for it to mimic the functionality of NationBuilder. And adding up the costs of all these additional platforms and integrations makes it much more expensive than list price.

In contrast, NationBuilder is the world’s first leadership software, providing everything you need to lead your organization, already fully integrated. NationBuilder includes a website, a database, all your communications tools, including email, social media, and text, the financial tools you need to accept donations and raise funds. The CMS includes over 30 action pages for advocacy, fundraising, and countless other ways to engage your visitors. The NationBuilder database is also best-in-class, dynamically updating with all actions taken on your site, and including advanced geocoding and filtering to target and engage users according to the actions they’ve taken with you, or demographic variables. Additionally, NationBuilder includes innovative features to help you lead, including NationBuilder paths, built to increase your supporters’ engagement with your organization, and goals to motivate your team and help you to achieve greater impact.

And full integration of all these tools isn't just convenient. It's the difference between retaining your supporters and losing them. And for many of our customers, its the difference between winning and losing. Full integration in one platform improves your insights into the impact you’re having, and helps you to take action on those insights from within the software. NationBuilder is designed to help you identify, attract, and engage more readers, supporters, donors, voters, or customers.

Important Considerations: 

Still interested in Action Network. Here are some important things to consider: 

• Cost: To replicate the essential functionality that NationBuilder can offer, your Action Network functionality will need to integrated with at least one or two (maybe more) other systems--a website and likely, a separate full-featured database. This has real costs, in man hours and in subscription fees to multiple vendors, not to mention the headache of going to a host of different places looking for answers when something breaks. 

• Customer service and support: If you're planning to use Action Network, remember to build in the cost of someone on retainer to help you trouble shoot, provide support for anything that breaks or updates that are needed, and, of course, to support any of the integrations you'll need to get the kind of impact you would from NationBuilder and our team of experts. That means whenever you have a question, you have to use outside technical support hours. NationBuilder provides a full team of the world's leading experts in digital organizing, as well as experts in nonprofit management, political campaigning, advocacy, and brand engagement. Every day, no matter what. 

• Security: Cyber attacks are a real threats and hacks are common, especially for high-profile leaders or efforts with real opponents. With Action Network, you'll need to make outside arrangements for someone to handle your security if you want protection. And, because they're not within the same system, your separate website or database could still be vulnerable. NationBuilder is equipped to handle the security of the most high-profile leaders in the world, and all of our customers get the benefit of that. Each customer has their own isolated database so you’re not vulnerable to shoddy firewalls or accidental leaks. We provide world-class DDoS protection to counter the real threat of cyber attacks by hackers trying to bring you down, keeping you organizing when it matters most. 

Scale to Grow With You

NationBuilder has reached a scale that allows us to serve everyone--from the largest institutions to the smallest campaigns. Our extensive ecosystem, includes hundreds of world class designers, developers, and apps to provide custom design and functionality for any organization, including best in class advocacy tools and integrations with crowdfunding platforms, email whippers for state and federal engagement in the US and abroad, and integrations with legacy CRMs like Salesforce and Raiser’s Edge for the largest organizations.

NationBuilder also offers special solutions for our largest Enterprise customers that Action Network can't match, including advanced features like single sign-on and secure pages via SSL. For those organizations with distributed infrastructures, including associations, nonprofits, alumni organizations, and political parties, with chapters, alliances, locals, and country offices, we’ve launched NationBuilder Network--the first product designed specifically to tackle the challenges facing distributed organizations, and unlock the unprecedented network effects that drive real impact. A real, comprehensive Network solution with controls to maintain branding, best-in-class tools for chapters, and that doesn't required hundreds or separately maintained websites or outside databases.