The following is a guest post by certified NationBuilder Agency, Code Nation. For support requests please contact this developer directly at [email protected]
The future of campaigning is not just digital. It’s the past of campaigning: real things in the real world. The best tools make that happen. That’s why we’re excited to launch our new “All In Events” tool. And yes, it’s proudly open source so your organisation can use it too (see the code here).
We know one of the biggest challenges for campaigning is getting the data from the real world into our online systems - this is true for data from our supporters as well as data about our events.
This gets extra complicated when we want to make extra impact - what if the events aren’t “our events” but those of our supporters, our allies or our community? How can we keep track of all that information and make sure the information is accessible to potential and future supporters?
Put simply, the tool allows you to do three things so that you can bring all your events into one place and empower your supporters to become leaders:
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You can sync events from multiple nations into one place: are you campaigning with a group of allies or co-organising a rally? No problem. They can have individual event pages in their nations and the details will sync into one central calendar.
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You can bulk import events to your nation. Someone in your coalition doesn’t use Nationbuilder yet? Too easy. They can collate their events in a spreadsheet and you can bulk upload them creating unique events for RSVPs and social promotion.
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Your supporters can create events without starting an account or signing in. Do people hate creating an account and password just to launch their event? No worries. Take that step away and let your community create events and share them directly. Your nation can capture the RSVPs and you can connect with the supporter who started it all.
You can see this tool in action with the www.yes.org.au campaign where events have been created by supporters using this custom event form without them needing to activate an account or endure a long-winded confirmation and login process. This allowed the Yes Campaign, a coalition focused on securing marriage equality in Australia, to be truly people powered.
We also implemented a version of this tool for our friends at the Stop Adani campaign who are showing that people across the country are concerned about building a mega coal mine next door to the Great Barrier Reef (also it’s 2017 and climate change is a thing).
If you’re interested in the technical side of this new open source tool then you can check out the GitHub repository, which includes a detailed explanation. Rest assured we’ve thought about this from a campaigner’s perspective so it supports custom event tagging, auto-calendar categorisation and admin notifications amongst a host of other useful features for your next campaign.
We hope our All In Events Tool will help more people take action in their communities, help you join forces with more allies, and for all of it to integrate seamlessly in your nation.
Happy campaigning.
