Basic NationBuilder concepts
Your nation
Nation is the term we use to describe a group of people united behind a common purpose. Everyone who cares about what you are doing -- your fans, followers, constituents, members, donors, volunteers, customers, shareholders, and partners -- are all part of your nation. Think Colbert Nation, Fox Nation, even Bieber Nation.
Your Accounts
When you started your nation, you created your initial administrator account with an email address and password. At the same time, we automatically created you a separate account on nationbuilder.com for support help, billing issues, and so you can interact with the broader NationBuilder community. These accounts are totally separate because your nation's database is completely separate from every other nation. So if you change your password in one place, it will not change it in the other place.
Your public website vs. your private control panel
NationBuilder runs your public website. You control what is on your public website, along with your supporter database, communications, finances, and everything else in what we call the control panel.
Permission levels
You can specify exactly who you want to have access to the control panel with a handful of permission levels:
- Administrator: This should be you! Full access
- Staffer: Full access to the control panel, but will not be able to change your plan or billing info.
- Leader: Full access to the control panel, except for the financial dashboard, and any importing/exporting of people.
- Intern: Full access to the control panel, except for the financial dashboard, publishing pages, importing/exporting, sending email/text blasts, tweeting, and posting to Facebook. Interns can create pages and email blasts, but they must be sent by a leader, staffer, or administrator.
Database
Each person in your database is either a Supporter, a Non-Supporter, or a Prospect. It is important to be aware of how this works before you import your existing contact data.
- Supporters are anyone who has said they want to receive updates from you or taken some kind of action. It can be as simple as following you on Twitter, but it can also be someone who has donated money, volunteered, or signed up on the website in any way. NationBuilder will automatically determine whether someone is a supporter or a non-supporter.
- Non-supporters are people who don't want to receive updates and haven't taken any action on your website. They are in your database because they have unsubscribed, or they might have tweeted about you (but aren't following you), things like that.
- Prospects are people you have added to your database who have not taken any action required to be deemed a supporter, but youwant them to.
If you are a political candidate, you would import your voter file as prospects. As people indicate support, they will automatically flip over to being supporters. It's important to keep them separate because you don't want to accidentally send them an email blast meant for supporters and annoy them. Sales leads, press leads, potential funders, these are all examples of prospects. Unless you say someone is a prospect, NationBuilder will automatically set them as a supporter or non-supporter.
Broadcasters
All of your external communications are organized around broadcasters and accessed from the messages tab in your control panel. It's important to decide the broadcasters (or voices) who will speak publicly on behalf of your nation. A non-profit organization might have one broadcaster for the organization overall, another for the executive director, and another for the volunteer coordinator. You can then attach an email address, a phone number (for receiving voice mails and sending/receiving text messages), a Twitter account, a Facebook page, or any combination to each broadcaster.
Broadcasters are completely separate from your people database. Any people with access to your control panel (except for interns) will be able to blast out messages as coming from one of your broadcasters.
When you attach a Twitter account to a broadcaster, anyone who follows that account, will automatically be added as a supporter to your nation. Anyone mentioning that Twitter account will be tracked and show up in your control panel, etc.
Follows and followers
When your supporters are connected to Facebook and Twitter, NationBuilder will automatically find their friends and followers that are also part of your nation and connect them. NationBuilder uses the same concept as Twitter where a supporter can follow another supporter without them having to confirm their relationship (which is what Facebook requires).
This helps you better understand some of the pre-existing relationships among your supporters by allowing you to see who follows who. Likewise, supporters can now see which of their friends are members of your nation. Supporters can also follow other supporters on your website, regardless of whether or not they follow them anywhere else.
People assigned to you
Every person can be assigned to a point person (someone with control panel access like a staffer). The point person will get an email notification and will be able to sort and track all the people assigned to them. And if the supporter signs in to the website, they will be able to see who their point person is so they always know who they can contact. This is meant especially for volunteers, who will automatically get assigned to whoever you designate as your volunteer coordinator when they sign up. Point people can be assigned manually or automatically, so if one of your staffers knows someone, you can set them as the point person one by one.
Tags, filters, and lists
Tags are the primary way to organize people in your database. Tags can be assigned automatically whenever someone does something on your website, like donating, voting on a suggestion, rsvp'ing for an event, but they can also be assigned manually however you want.
Filters are advanced searches that you can save and access whenever you want. A filter might be everyone who donated more than $100, anyone in a particular state, anyone following you on Twitter, or any combination of things. Virtually every thing about a person can be sliced and diced into filters.
Lists can be created with the + and - buttons next to people. Clicking the + sign will add that person to your shopping cart, which you will see in the top right corner of the control panel. The main purpose of lists are so you can do something to a bunch of people all at the same time. Like if you are looking at everyone who RSVP'ed for an event and realize that you want to tag them all. You can just add them to your shopping cart, and then tag all those people at once using the "batch update."
Pages
Pages are all the pages on your public website. NationBuilder has a whole array of standard pages that will do everything you need to grow and manage your nation like blog posts, donation forms, volunteer signups, event invitations, and selling tickets.
When creating pages for your website an important concept is the distinction between the top nav and the supporter nav. The top nav means the page will be displayed across your horizontal navigational bar at the top of any page on your website. The supporter nav is displayed vertically on either the right or left hand side, and it's only displayed when a supporter is logged in to your website. All of the main pages of your site should be in your top nav, but you will also have pages that are only useful if someone is logged in like who they are following, or the personal activity stream of everyone they are following, and those should go in your supporter nav.
Activity streams
You can see every thing happening in your nation in real time throughout the control panel. It's very similar to the Facebook news feed, except it's everything happening in your nation. There is an overall dashboard for the whole nation, along with individual activity streams for each person and page.
Some activities are public and available on the website, but others are private (noted with a lock icon) and only seen in the control panel. For example, if a person donates and doesn't want that known publicly, it will set that activity to private so it will only show up on your control panel.
Economy and virtual currency
Virtual currency, known as political capital (pc), can be awarded to supporters for a variety of actions. Whether it's following you on twitter, commenting on a blog post, or signing up to volunteer, your users can accumulate pc and spend it. Virtual currency in NationBuilder is fully editable, you choose how much users can earn for each action and what they can spend it on. It's a great way to encourage participation and spur competition.
Rules
Set up rules to govern your nation. Let people know that intolerance, abuse, spamming, and other unfriendly behavior is unacceptable. NationBuilder allows you to create your own rules (make them as specific to your organization's needs as you want) and add more as time goes on, so that you can litigate issues and complaints as they arise. If need be, NationBuilder lets you ban rule breakers from your site.
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