I would love to be able to have people submit other file types (e.g. PDFs) on a page - so we can collect resumes and other content from users.

We would need this capacity soon in order to use NB for the purpose we're envisioning -

Thanks!

Once an intern creates a page or blast there should be a way to flag the item as needing follow-up as a leader (or higher) needs to publish the page/send the blast.

Currently the intern has to send a communication outside of NB (email, facebook etc) in order to let some one know the item is ready to be published/sent.

It would be very helpful to have the ability to flag the item for follow-up thereby keeping the communication with in NB.

Thanks!

I'm currently correcting dozens of addresses for contacts who were imported without values in the city or country field.

Nation Builder is smart and tries to fill in the values. Where it falls down for me is that it starts it's search for matching addresses in the US. My addresses are mostly in Brighton and all in the UK.

It would have been useful for me if I could have specified at some point that the address matching algorithm should start in my city of interest.

It would be great to be able to personalize the ask amount a donor sees in the body text of their emails based on their previous giving history. ie - Donor A gave $80 and is asked for $120 (1.5 * 80) and Donor B gave $300 and is asked for $450 (1.5 * 300), or similar.

Ideally, this would work in concert with the ability to customize on the fly the ask amounts a donor sees on the linked donation page. ActBlue, for example, allows a query string like http://actblue.com/...?amounts=10,20,30,40,50 to change the amounts on the page. 

The end goal here is to ask each donor for a specific dollar amount based on their previous giving history and then to show them a personalized donation page that reflects the email body ask.

We have several lists of people. Some may be considered to have absolute sovereignty over accuracy. For instance, in an election the electoral roll.

Other lists may still be pretty reliable, but should defer to the "canon" material in cases of disagreement. In our example, this could be membership data.

Finally, we have some data which is so stale and inaccurate that it only has value in the absence of more reliable information.

What I'd like to be able to do is to weight these lists as I import them, such that there is no ambiguity when records are merged. The problem currently is that I'm never sure which mailing address (for instance) will be retained after the merge.

Too many campaigns I've worked with insist that the social stream be turned off about 2 days after it gets turned on.  While they may realize *some* of the value of publishing a social stream, they especially find the spam-like properties ('content') of a new follower, especially a 'commercial' follower offensive, spam-like, and 'out of control'.

It would help a lot of campaigns (and others) happily take advantage of NB's social stream features if we could curate the social stream entries that we publish.  Although I realize the programming would be a bit extensive, this could be offered in control panels with 2 simple controls:

1.  In site settings, a checkbox under 'Show Stream' that allows the site managers to 'Curate Stream' - if that is set, then the following appears:

2.  A checkbox next to each social stream entry in the Dashboard that, if checked, makes that entry appear in the public social stream.

This would deliver the added benefit of actually getting the campaign staff to pay close attention to their social stream in the private Dashboard, looking for positive social stream candidates (nuggets)  to publish.  Now, many simply turn off the social stream and regard the social stream in the Dashboard as a nuisance they have to get past to go do something else productive (I know, I know...).

FYI, here is some code that will make the 'content' of social stream entries disappear (as long as you set the 'activity_no_content' class to something like .activity_no_content [ display:none; visibility:hidden; ]  

This allows one to publish the fact of a follow, tweet, retweet, etc. but not the content, so thus removes campaign staff objections that we are publishing someone's 'commercial message' (twitter profile) when they follow the campaign twitter feed.  

[% for activity in site.activities limit: 13 %]
<div class="activity">
[[ activity.show | replace: 'activity_content','activity_no_content' ]]
</div>
[% endfor %]

Whenever someone adds a comment, it automatically sends an email to previous commenters on the comment thread.  The two problems of this is that it leads to spamming by commenters and essentially let's them use a comment thread as blast email software to our nation's supporters.  There is currently no way to turn this off, except to remove comments altogether;  there should be a way to shut this functionality off, while still allowing comments on a page.  When I presented this to a NationBuilder contact, they responded that this is built this way to "encourage conversation and interaction" but what you're really encouraging is unsubscribes and poor user-interface control for people who use your product.  Please let me know when I can stop commenters from spamming my email list, as we (and I'm sure many other users who are completely unaware this is happening) would like to implement this change as soon as possible.  Thank you.

NationBuilder has this annoying habit of trying to guess the city, state, and zip code of an address when only supplied with the first line. It guesses wrong nearly 100% of the time, at least for me.

I get no benefit from the incorrect guessing, and it keeps me from doing things. I think I'll have problems with the API, since my other system does not have this behavior. If I accept a record with just the street (political campaign data entry is messy), then NB will throw in some incorrect city, state, and zip info. Somehow I'll have to watch for that and get rid of it. I don't want to change my model validations to require all address fields, or none. 

I suggest either making it work well, or turning it off. Google has a hard time with this, and I think NB is better at other things. So I vote turn it off. 

I need to follow up on a specific volunteer who was flagged to me days after data has been entered and shredded.

I only know that she was contacted within a period of 5 days & is disabled, which was put in notes. I do not know how my phone bankers recorded the conversation. If I were to be able to search notes, I would not have to go through over 100 profiles manually.

2 Comments on Email Footers-

I understand the need for Nation Builder to advertise, but please can you change the wording? When it says "Created by Nation Builder..." it makes it seem like people are getting a canned email that was automatically generated by a database. Can't it just have a nice Nation Builder logo at the bottom. I created the email, Nation Builder was the tool that I used to send the email.

Also, I really want to be able to edit the footer at the bottom of my emails. I don't want all of my address info and website info for every email we send. It isn't always appropriate and makes the email again look too canned. In this age of mass communication, we cannot afford to make an email look like a canned message. It needs to be more personalized. Can you enable a feature where we can edit our own footers instead of NationBuilder deciding what to put in them?

Apparently, when I last uploaded donations from another cycle it assigned everyone that had given during that cycle (automatically) as a fundraiser and their own recruiter. I exported the fundraiser list, changed most of them to FALSE and imported to correct the issue as it blocked my ability to assign fundraisers because there were too many in the system.   In my opinion, Nation Builder should not automatically credit someone as a fundraiser or recruiter when they donate, it diminishes our abilities to track who is soliciting money.

In using NationBuilder to develop a portal for a membership-based organization, I'm realizing that it would be incredibly helpful to have more features supporting this kind of community interaction. 

I would like to be able to search through the Lists, instead of browsing, as it takes too long to find records by browsing. Also I have 1600 duplicates, so the dedupe function is not practical. I need to be able to automate the dedupe or get a list view with checkboxes, it would take forever for 1600 records 1 page at a time. Thx! 

When sorting my activity feed it lacks the total number of records, and a 'last' button and a 'page 6 of XX' indicator. All are very much needed with a large dataset.

Hi,

When wanting to edit a page, I click on the LHS pencil icon except that I have a couple of Feedback pages. In order to edit them I have to click the link in the 'Type' column then click over to the 'intro' tab to edit. This is not intuitive at all and I think needs changing.

Alex

We support people with cancer and their family and loved ones. It is very important to our work that we are able to tie households together in our database.

We would like to assign people titles like father, mother, son, daughter or friend. Then we would like to mark the head of household to indicate who would be our main point for correspondence. 

Managers ought to be able to comment on the notes posted by people lower than they are in a NB heirarchy to give feedback and advice.

Max charge $.25/donation would be a great step forward, no?

Currently without a page/site-tree in the backend, data heavy sites can get cumbersome to edit. the use of Slickmap.css to create a visual sitemap would be killer in allowing for easier navigation/editing/visualizing of a data heavy Nation. This could be done either in the back-end or front-end and being completely css driven, easily integrated into any system without JS issues.

The ability to utilize Slickmap could be enabled on the front-end by a new page type that is built to display the site layout regardless of the page setting to be included in the top-nav. At the moment, and I may be incorrect, I can find no way to accomplish this with the current templating language. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Here is information regarding slickmap.css:

http://astuteo.com/slickmap

The "easy" way to embed content by pasting links is actually more difficult to use than the embed code.

Some sites aren't recognized by NationBuilder to embed by link.  Which is annoying.  Other sites, like LiveStream, only one particular link to the page will work (not the one out of the embed code, not the one from the livestream channel page) which is tedious.