By Since I joined NationBuilder over two years ago, we have been talking about what the core experience of using the product should be. NationBuilder has always been an incredibly powerful and deeply integrated set of tools, but we knew that we needed to help leaders distribute power through their organizations so they could scale their efforts.
So we have reoriented the product around defining your goals and laying out the ways you plan to achieve those goals in your organization. This upgrade is a whole new way of using NationBuilder.
Goals - Easily create and track goals in your dashboard
In order for your organization to successfully achieve its mission, you need to clearly define your goals. You can now do that easily in NationBuilder. With a few clicks you can create goals for donations, volunteers, contacts, supporters, customers, members, paths started, paths completed, and path value completed. All your goals will be automatically updated when activity happens in your nation.
Goals are the place where everyone should get started with NationBuilder.
Paths - Leading people to take action, one step at a time
A path is a series of steps you create in your nation to facilitate progress towards your goals. You can craft custom paths with steps that are closely aligned with your organization's needs. You can put people on paths one at a time, with a batch update, or automatically when they take an action on your website. Once you’ve added people to paths, you can move them along until they complete or abandon the path.
Here is what a person’s profile looks like when they're on paths.
Since paths are a guide to where someone is at in their relationship with your organization, they tell you what needs to happen next. You can see that Jason is on three paths. Each path name describes what we hope he’ll do for our organization, and each step describes his progression towards taking that important action. Here are some examples of paths you might create. Assigning paths and steps to your control panel users makes it possible to distribute responsibility for cultivating a huge number of supporters.
Each path in your nation represents a commitment to how you want to do your work. By agreeing ahead of time how you want to respond when people express interest in being a part of what you’re doing, you make it easy for anyone in your organization to take action.
Paths view - An overview of people’s progress
Once you’ve created paths and put people on them, you want to be able to see how well you are doing at moving people along those paths. The paths view is a new view in the people section that makes it very easy to see all the people on your paths. Each step of the path is shown with counts of the number of people. Each person on a path is represented by a card with a followup date (if one is set) and a point person responsible for that path or step.
Looking at your paths in this way lets you find bottlenecks or gaps in the way your organization is working. In the paths view above we can see that we only have 50 people at the identified supporter step, which tells me we need to identify some more potential volunteers. We also have 154 people at signed up, which is a bottleneck. We need to spend some time responding to all of them and moving them along the path.
Paths view is part of the People section with all of NationBuilder’s powerful sorting and filtering. Seeing a high level view of where people are at on a path, with all the powerful filtering of the people section, gives you incredible visibility into how effectively your organization is working.
A/B testing - Email blast with confidence
Just one more thing! A much requested feature is now here -- email A/B testing. Picking a great subject line for your email blast takes forever, we know. Now you can let NationBuilder automatically pick the best one with confidence. More in the A/B testing HOWTO.
Software for leaders
At NationBuilder, our entire team is aligned around the mission of helping leaders to develop and organize thriving communities. We’re proud of this upgrade, and we can’t wait to see all the amazing things you’ll accomplish with the new features.
This upgrade also includes new pricing plans, expanded support, training and professional services. If you are a current customer, we have a detailed FAQ on how to upgrade, including a special offer.
You can also give us a call at 213-394-4623 or email [email protected].
See a recording of the webinar we held to introduce these new features:
