I’m a government geek. I joined NationBuilder back in 2011 after several years in city government and City Hall journalism (and founding Gov 2.0 Radio) and immediately put together proposals for how governments could use our community building software. Flash forward to early this month, when the the first customers of our brand new government edition started launching their websites. I was giddy with excitement.
There are 90,000 government bodies in the U.S. alone - and with NationBuilder they now have a cost-effective platform for web, CRM and communications technology.
If you work in government, it’s likely you’ve had one of these painful experiences:
- You just got elected and all the constituent software your predecessors were using is ridiculously bad.
- You want to redo your outdated small city website, but traditional vendors want upwards $25,000 a year for a new contract.
- You need to manage email newsletters and social media across a team of communicators but stitching together a bunch of different solutions just doesn’t make sense.
NationBuilder solves these problems.
NationBuilder is a unified website, communications and CRM database solution that government offices can use to manage events, log and track issues, send email newsletters, and manage social media communications and an entire website all in one place.
Check out these pioneering early adopters:
Long Beach, CA - Inside District 9
In Long Beach, Councilmember Steve Neal’s staff of six worked with a NationBuilder architect to create Inside District 9, a community and communications hub for the district that includes events, profiles of community members, and forms for reporting concerns.
“Before we had a simple website, we could publish and take submissions,” said Rex Richardson, Neal’s chief of staff. NationBuilder “gives people ownership.”
“They can make sure their neighborhood has an active blog and share things with friends on Facebook,” Neal said. “I can map everyone who’s reported a pothole in the past month and identify repeat reports from the same neighborhood.”
cStreet Campaigns helped Neal’s team conceptualize, design and implement their new constituent services nation (read a case study on the project here). The project was completed in just three weeks, cost less, and delivered 10 times the features of their previous solutions, Richardson said. NationBuilder “absolutely has helped us be more efficient,” he said. “We used our [old] website a lot, and this can do a lot more than that.”
Bordentown Township, NJ
Cities are having a similar experience with using NationBuilder for their full websites and to communicate with their citizens. Bordentown, a fast-growing township of 11,000 in Burlington County, New Jersey, designed and launched its new official website in just a week using one of NationBuilder's government-focused website themes.
The site features essential services like online tax payments (embedding existing web services in NationBuilder is dead simple), events, officeholder contact information and indexed pages for all of the township's agencies and key documents. "Nationbuilder served as the ideal platform to provide Bordentown Township with a newly re-designed website integrating their communications and social media to keep residents informed of the latest news and information,” said Jason Springer, the township’s webmaster.
San Francisco, CA - California Loan Refund
In San Francisco, City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s Office needed a powerful platform to run a 90-day California-wide settlement outreach program to victims of predatory lending practices. They turned to NationBuilder to get the word out.
"NationBuilder is very robust," said Jen Drake, Deputy Director of Community Relations. "I’ve built websites using Wordpress but it requires so many workarounds to link it to Facebook and Twitter. With NationBuilder it’s all built in, making it really easy for people to share the content. I like that people can sign in to the website, track what they’re doing and get their friends involved.”
Learn more about NationBuilder for government by contacting me here: nationbuilder.com/workwithadriel or just email me, [email protected]. To help our government customers get up and running with NationBuilder quickly, we’ve released 'Civitas,' a new public theme created specifically for officials, agencies and municipalities.
