Can NationBuilder allow members networks choose, if they wish, a term other than 'political capital'?

The world of politics tends to be one of zero-sum power struggles. Terms such as karma or contribution points may be more in the spirit of self-organizing, peer to peer online communities.

I hope you'll let member nations set their own terms, or choose among several pre-set options, for the recognition/appreciation system that they feel may be the best fit.

Best,

Mark Frazier (@openworld)

Any plans to adds tools that would allow Nations to be multiple language?

To have a nation display in both english and spanish we'd need not just a content mgmt tool for i18n, but also a way to create and organize templates into spanish and english, and a button to allow users to switch back and forth.

It would be great to allow volunteers to login and make phone calls from lists, with multiple people calling off the same list at the same time. Developing this internally would certainly be non trivail.

Callfire.com is a system that has already been done correctly, and they have an API. Here is a link to their API info, http://www.callfire.com/dialer/cm/custom_telephony.html

We had a user for whom we merged profiles and upon merging, one of the two email addresses associated with the user was lost. It would be nice to have the ability to maintain more than one email address.

Thanks for updating the deduping options. When going through the list, here are the options:

Yes, this is the same person
No, this is not the same person
None of these are the same person

We are working with several campaigns, and permission levels are  becoming an issue.

I would like the ability to have granular permission control over features and fields, as well as the ability to create more user types, so that we can allow/restrict access where needed.

Right now, even interns have the ability to import and export data, which will greatly limit the number of people that the candidates allow to access to the system.

On import you must map the fields in your file to the fields in the database.

One should be able to save field mapping to facilitate future imports with identical column headers (field set).

It would be great to have automated emails for expiring membership terms - so if someone signs up in January, they get an email in December reminding them to renew and than another reminder right before renewal. The ability to customize this kind of email alert would be very helpful for membership organizations.

One extremely important feature for canvassing is to be able to include all the people in a given household in a walk or call list. For example, if you're going door-to-door you want everyone in the household listed in case they are the ones answering the door. By household I mean everyone at the same exact address (including apt # so don't use lat/lng).

Ideally there are two areas where householding should be used. When printing a walk list (or call list) an option to "include others in household" should be added. If selected, all others in household should be added but ideally there should be some indicator that they are "secondary" to the primary targets. Boldface perhaps.

The second place would be during searches. There could be a button that takes an existing search result and "households it" adding all others in the same addresses. There could be another checkbox during the search - maybe next to the green search button - to make that happen at search time.

I consider both of these crucial for real door-to-door realities.

Thanks...

It would be great if there was a real forum on this site.

While the "Do you like this page?" buttons can be removed via the template, it would nice to just have a checkbox on page settings to hide them.

I reckon that for a couple pages of every nation the suggestion to "like" may not make sense.

This is probably the most requested featured at the moment to make it easy to integrate with existing WordPress/Drupal/Joomla CMSes.  We are working on it.

NationBuilder is a great tool but one has to admit that it is not as mature or feature rich when it comes to bulk emailing as something like MailChimp.

I suggest NationBuilder offer a paid option which synchs with a MailChimp account (MailChimp has the API hooks). That would offer NationBuilder customers the full power of a mature bulk email tool without eating into NationBuilder’s business model.

Disappointed, and frankly feeling a little misled to learn that when you say we can accept recurring payments, you mean we can accept them only if:  the new member makes the contribution online, and if they either have or are willing to open a PayPal account as part of the process.  

We take most of our payments the old-fashioned way: asking people to become members in person, and having them fill out a membership card.  Organizers need to be able to enter recurring payments off of those cards when they get back to the office in order for this feature to be useful to us.  We're willing to pay the monthly PayPal fee for their recurring billing system, if that provides an easier API for you guys to hook into.  Or, we could go back to the Authorize.net/merchant account we were using prior to switching to PayPal to accomodate this system, if that's an easier API toolset to set this up without making members jump through account-opening hoops.

I'm not sure why there aren't page templates for a photo gallery or at least to include a feed from Flickr or the like. Can you please add it?

There's no warning that you're about to lose unsaved changes when going from the say the "Into" section of an event to the "Location" section. It's fairly simple javascript to pop up a warning that unsaved changes will be lost. Can't tell you how many times I've lost unsaved edits this way.

I would LOVE an auto-save feature! I can't count the number of times I've forgotten to save my work and lost it all when I move to another page.

Where I am (Raleigh) most all local elections (City Council, County Commissioners, School Board) are in off years.  The voter data for those elections can be very different than regular election years.  Including that data for sorting is critical to parse usable lists.  Even if there was an easy way to import the off year data, that would work, but we are having a hard time doing that.