NationBuilder has nine official themes and more than 100 styles within those options. You can also customize themes and many do - see our featured site gallery. 

 When you first set up a NationBuilder account, you'll be prompted to choose a site theme during the quick install process. You can easily change your theme later by going to Pages > Theme. 

Here are the nine broad themes you can choose from:

The Air theme has seven styles:

The Basic theme is a stand-alone:

The Bliss theme has 15 styles:

The Cascade theme has 24 styles:

The background-image centric Focus theme has two styles, black text on a light background, and white text on a dark background:

 The Impression theme has 15 styles:

The minimalist Paper theme has three styles:

The Resolve theme features full-width slider images and has 15 styles:

The Revolution theme has 20 styles:

You can also check out this blog post from the NationBuilder implementation experts at Richir Outreach for a closer look at our official themes.

NationBuilder's flexible CMS allows you to do just about anything you'd like, with basic pages with content WYSIWYG, basic HTML and template editors. Additionally, we have a growing selection of page types with rich integrated features for organizing. Just click on "new page" to access all of these page types:

ActBlue: Connect an ActBlue entity and automatically pull in all the donations. This can be your primary donation page, or a secondary one. It requires your entity donation page URL (it has to be your actual entity page ex. not a “Friends of Abe” page). Page-specific settings include auto-tagging.

Activity Stream: A Facebook-style news feed of activity happening on the site or of people you're following.

Basic: Nothing fancy, just pure HTML.

Blog: Blogs can have many blogs posts, unlimited authors, comments, extended entries, and embedded media from more than 200 sites. Advanced settings under the "blog" tab allow you to specify which blog posts to show, how many to show, etc. and whether or not logged-in visitors can write guest posts. You can also auto-tag anyone who posts a guest blog entry.

Calendar: Listing of upcoming events, optionally allow user submitted events, searching for nearby events, and an overview map of all events. It is a container for events, specifying what its events should be called, whether or not all events on the site should be included on the page, and can optionally include only specific event types (ex. a page for all of your meet and greet activities). It sorts events by date chronologically by default. You can switch it to be by distance, and choose whether or not to show a map. You can include a custom introduction and  choose to allow user generated events with sub-menu settings, including assigning a point person to any event creators. It also includes autoresponse emails.

Donation: Accept credit card donations. Supports goals for both donors and amount donated, automatic public recognition of recent donors, and autoresponse thank you emails. You can link your donation page to credit card processing with or without a merchant account through providers including Democracy Engine, PayPal, SagePay, Payflow Pro and Authorize.net. In the page settings, you can set minimums and maximums for amounts, and goals for total amount or number of donors. It allows you to show the most recent public donation and to create an introduction with text and/or video. Use the page settings to auto-tag donors, assign them to a point person, and notify a member of your nation by email of any new donations.

Endorsement: Individuals and/or organizations can make endorsements. You can set a goal and feature important endorsements. This page type supporters auto-tagging and point person assignments as well as automatic notifcations. You can also allow supporters to endorse by text message keyword and review your endorsements, feature key endorsements and endorser photos, and print a PDF of your signatures.

Event: Supports rsvps, hosts, multiple paid ticket levels, tracking attendees, two-way Facebook event integration, staging locations, rsvp autoresponse emails with directions, and printable lists for the door. The "Event details" tab includes an advanced settings submenu. You can specify location settings, hosts and ticket sales, and the page type supports auto-tagging, point person assignments, and auto-notifications for your nation's leaders. You can create a text and/or video intro, and allow supporters to RSVP by text message keyword. The page also supports volunteer signups and shift assignments, You can also copy an event by clicking on "clone."

FAQ: Frequently asked questions. Container for questions. Allow detailed questions and answers.

Feedback: Anything requiring a single free form text field, like 'contact us' or 'tell your story'." The page type includes feedback labels, a volunteer recruitment options, and auto-tagging. You can automatically assign point people for anyone who leaves feedback, notify leaders of new feedback by email, and include a text and/or rich media introduction.

Find Friends: For people to use their Facebook or Twitter accounts to connect with their friends and followers who have already joined.

Followers: Everyone following the signed in person.

Follows: Everyone the signed in person is following.

Leaderboard: Publish one or many leaderboards to recognize your stars. A container for leaderboards created under People > Leaderboards, which can include recognition for recruiting, twitter activity and political capital. You can also create a text and rich media introduction.

Meetup Everywhere: Show a map of your Meetup Everywhere communities with upcoming nearby meetups. You can also customize introduction text and rich media.

Moneybomb: Supporters can pledge an amount to donate at a very specific time and recruit others to do the same. Turns a fundraising drive into an event. Includes the option of a custom introduction, autoresponses, auto-tagging, point person assignment, and notification emails for new pledges.

Paid Membership: Accept payment for an annual, monthly, or weekly site membership. Support for multiple membership levels at different price points. In the page settings, you can specify who notifications go to, create membership options, and customize an introduction and the autoresponse emails to new members.

Petition: The online activism stalwart. You can set a signature goal, collect comments, pictures, and people can choose whether to publish their signature on the site. The page includes advanced settings, point person assignment, email notifications of new signatures, optional auto-tagging, signatures through text keywords, and volunteer recruitment. You can also review your signatures, map supporters, and print out a PDF of your signatures.

Political Capital: The history and current balance of the signed in person's political capital. You can also edit this page to say "participation credit" if you don't want to award political chits.

Press Release: Assign a headline and author with contact info to a content field. Pulls in contact number and email for author automatically.

Recruiting: Recruit friends and track their involvement. Have they donated? Are they volunteering? You can create an introduction and select a page for supporters to promote. Automatically generates recruiter links for many social media sites.

Redirect: Create a link on your NationBuilder site that simply leads to another page or an entirely different website (with another URL). Redirects can also be created under Pages > Legacy > New redirect.

Rules: The simplest and surprisingly most effective way to keep a nation civil is by having a set of rules and enforcing them. On the rules page, you can set notifications when a rule is broken, customize intro text, create new rules and edit the defaults, and customize autoresponses for when rules are violated.

Signup: Basic signup form, you can ask for email address, physical address, phone, whether they want to volunteer, etc. Settings include auto-tagging, volunteer recruitment, point person assignment, and autoresponse emails. You can also create a list of database tags for new signups to choose one from.

Suggestion Box: Crowdsource suggestions and allow people to rate them based on criteria you specify, or to comment. For example, you can solicit policy ideas around a particular topic and let people rate the ideas based on whether they are good, bad, impractical or important. Or you can crowdsource questions for an event, letting people rate them as great, off-topic, important, etc. The page type is a container for suggestions, and includes autoresponse emails and optional auto-tagging.

Survey: Collect answers to your multiple choice survey questions. Frequently survey questions are used in phone banking and canvassing, but with this page, you can collect the information directly on your website too. You get a customizable introduction, optional auto-tagging, point person assignments, and email notifications of new surveys. You can create multiple-choice, yes-no or open ended survey questions and review and export the results. You could also do a door-to-door survey canvass with wireless tablets and NationBuilder.

Unsubscribe: Allows signups to opt-out of receiving emails. An unsubscribe page should be linked at the bottom of all your email blasts and we automatically create one for you.

Volunteer Signup: Asks for detailed contact info and for any volunteer tasks or roles you may want like hosting an event, interning, or stuffing envelopes. It includes optional auto-tagging, autoresponse emails, point person assignments, and an optional custom introduction with text and/or rich media. You can also assign tags to volunteers based on the roles they sign up for on your page.

Vote Pledge: People can find out if they can vote, and pledge their support (or not). Optionally count the votes with a goal. Include a video, and this is the perfect page for people to send their friends.

Voter Registration: Tight integration with Rock the Vote's nationwide voter registration system. Voters will get printable forms they can mail in, and we'll automatically capture email addresses of signups.

Yes. You can use iframes and JavaScript elements with NationBuilder - you need to put the code in the template of your page, not the content or basic HTML editor.

NationBuilder lets you have unlimited pages on your website, and it's easy to set up new pages specifically designed for activities that will help grow your community. Just go to "Pages" in the control panel, click on your site name, then on "New page." You'll be able to choose from dozens of page types that include things like autoresponders for people who sign up for events, custom roles for volunteers, and blogs that support multiple authors. 

With NationBuilder, you design your website around the activities and services your community wants. Our platform has special pages for ActBlue, Meetup and registering voters with Rock the Vote, and page types designed around press releases, calendars and events, endorsements, leaderboards for top supporters, petitions, suggestions boxes for crowdsourcing, custom surveys and much more.

Text on most forms can easily be changed by entering the template editor and searching for the text you want to change. Editable text in the template editor is displayed in white. When you're editing your page, just click on the "template" button to get started.

NationBuilder makes it easy to change your theme's color palette.  

The first step is to create a custom theme. While it's possible to create your custom theme from scratch, we recommend cloning an official theme and style variation that's closest to what you're going for, and then modify it to your liking. We've found this to be faster and easier way to get started. Watch a great video walkthrough here. Once you've created your custom theme, you'll be ready to start making changes to the colors.

Go to Pages > Theme > theme.scss to open up your theme's style sheet. Once there you will see a list of theme colors. Each theme color corresponds to an element on the website.

In this example, theme_color_1 is the header background and button color. You can pick and try different colors to see what you like using online tools like ColorPicker or ComputerHope.

In the example above, I changed the theme_color_1 to #000000 (black), clicked "save & publish," and that changed the colors of my header background and buttons. You can make changes for all of the colors on your website in this way. Enjoy!

Nope! You can create pages/subpages and yet more subpages for each of your organizations, and each of these sections could have their own blog, calendar, suggestion boxes, any of the pages you can create.

The main Facebook page for your site is assigned according to the site's main broadcaster. You can assign the main broadcaster by going to Pages > Settings. If you need to change the Facebook page linked to your broadcaster, go to Messages > choose the appropriate broadcaster > Settings > Facebook > and connect the page you want for your nation. You will have to be logged into Facebook as someone who has permissions for that page.

If you don't have a Facebook page connected to the main broadcaster, people will still be able to like the page on Facebook and share the link to the nation there.

Sometimes if you change your page settings, Facebook won't immediately catch up and it will continue to highlight an old headline from your site. If that happens, you can update your site's Facebook settings by running your URL through Facebook's debugger. Do that here.

NationBuilder works great with Google products and Chartbeat's real-time traffic monitoring. You don't need to upload anything to your site or modify templates because we've created a spot in your dashboard for adding the Google Analytics code, site verification key for Webmaster tools and Google Apps (including email), and Chartbeat's API key and UID.

To link any of these tools to your nation, go to the Pages dashboard and click Settings > Analytics setup.

For more information on using custom analytics with NationBuilder, check out this blog post on analyzing traffic and recruitment with partner organizations and our screencast on setting up Google Analytics and creating activity chains.

In order to place images on any NationBuilder page you must first upload them to the page (this also applies to email blasts). From the Settings tab or the Content tab for that page in the control panel go to the Files tab. Any Files tab in NationBuilder allows you to upload images from your computer directly to that NationBuilder page or email blast. 

Once you've done this you still have to place the images where you want them on the page; you do this in your content editor, so go back to the content tab (or corresponding tab that brings you to the page's content editor). On your content editor's toolbar you're going to click on the Insert edit/image button, the button which looks like a window with a green plus sign in the bottom right hand corner. When you do this, you'll get a insert/edit image pop-up on your screen. The second field down is Image list, from here you'll be able to choose from any images that you uploaded in the files tab for this particular page. 

You can add an image description, which helps with search engine optimization. Also, there are lots a fields for adjusting how your image looks on the page. When you are ready click insert. You can always resize your image in the content editor too. 

You can embed Google Custom Search to allow users to search all the content on your website:

http://www.google.com/cse/

Make sure you paste the custom search embed code directly into the template of a page, not into the content editor.

Google will not index your site right away, so you should work to get some external links to your new nation from other sites or submit it to Google directly.  Once Google and other search engines know your site exists, NationBuilder does provide a sitemap that will help the search engines index all of your public pages.

In order to insert links to other pages on your website or other websites on the internet you use the link button on your content editor's toolbar. 

From within your page's Content tab (or corresponding tab that brings you to the page's content editor) highlight the text that you want to turn into a link. Then click on the link icon in the toolbar, and you will get a pop-up window prompting you to insert the url of the page you want to link to. Set the target to open the link in the same window or in a different windor. You can also un-link highlighted text using the un-link icon in the toolbar.

NationBuilder supports separate websites sharing one nation's database. Each additional site is $9 per month, and custom URLs are $5 per site.

To configure a featured content slider, click Pages and then Edit next to the page you wish to install it on. Then click Settings > Featured Content Slider.

You add one image at a time. Choose a label for your image and enter the slug of the page on your website which you want your image to link to (the label text will link to the slide, not the page). The action text you specify will be overlayed on top of the image and clickable. Now select an image to upload from your computer by clicking on Choose File.

Images look best when they span the width of your left column, so an image size of 660px by 250px usually works well. In some themes, such as Revolution, the image slider spans the entire page width, in which case you'd want an image size of about 960px by 250px. Make sure all your images are exactly the same size so they cleanly slide into each other.

You can then select to publish your slider and click on Save featured content slider to save. You can always go back and edit an existing slider. Now you are ready to add more sliders to your display; do this by taking the same steps you did to create the first one. You can re-order the slides simply by dragging and dropping them into place. We recommend 3-5 sliders to avoid crowding.

Nationbuilder works to integrate your Twitter and Facebook followers and supporters into your nation. Unlike custom social networks like Ning and others, it doesn't try to fill the role of a stand-alone social site, rather NationBuilder draws on public Twitter and Facebook data and activities on your site to fill out your nation's database and our "public profile" feature. The public profile for a supporter will have things like tweets about your nation and primary broadcaster, event RSVPs, donations and other public interactions.

NationBuilder automatically assigns "supporter" status to someone who has opted in to receiving information from you - by following you on Twitter or subscribing to email updates, for example. A "non-supporter" is someone who has interacted with your broadcaster or nation - sometimes just by your broadcaster retweeting or mentioning them on Twitter - but has not chosen to receive your updates. 

You can manually assign support status to a person or a batch of people by changing their support level to a 1 or a 2 in the dashboard. You can also chose to turn off public profiles for individuals (public profiles are indexed by Google) or for the whole site. To turn them off site-wide, you go to Pages > Settings and uncheck the "Show public profiles" box. Public profiles for identical people will be different for each nation, although elements like a Twitter bio photo might be the same. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, NationBuilder does not have universal logins.

Let's look at some examples of how public profiles work:

Someone who has signed up for email updates will see their own avatar picture (drawn from Twitter or Facebook, or a generic picture if they don't have one with those service or haven't authorized NationBuilder to interact with those services) and a link to their own public profile when they are logged into a site.

In the example above, if I were not opted-in, I would not have a public profile link.

Supporters' public profiles will appear different to people who are logged into the site and those who are not. Logged in users will see a supporters' public profile with a notes field where people in a nation can leave each other messages. The stream below the profile will include interactions with the site and main broadcaster, as well as any of these public notes.

The example above does not have the notes field, but it includes recent interactions between the main broadcaster and the POTUS' Twitter account, and links where others can interact with those recent tweets, including replying or favoriting.

Non-supporters in your nation's database will have an ID in the system and you can interact with them on Twitter and put in private notes and other information in your dashboard. They will not have a public profile.

Supporters, who for example follow your main broadcaster on Twitter, also have IDs in the dashboard, and you have more administrative options related to their public profile, like the ability to review any pages they have authored and to edit their public profile.

To customize your favicon, you will first need a custom theme.

Then you can create a favicon.ico file using a tool like this: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

Upload that file to Pages > Theme > Files. Lastly, add the following HTML in the <head> of your layout.html file: <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico">

You can customize the widths, paddings and margins of your custom theme. However, in a two column layout, the left column should have a minimum of 660px, as several elements (such as video embeds) expect that width to populate properly.

As a reference, the official themes use a width of 960px. The left column is 660px and the right column is usually 240px. Generally there is 15px of padding on both sides of both columns, but this can vary a bit from theme to theme. You can also disable the sidebar on any page so it uses full width.

The custom theme documentation and object reference guide, available in the right column of your custom theme page in the control panel, will provide many other helpful details as you build your custom theme.

You'll find activity streams throughout NationBuilder. The biggest and most comprehensive of which is on your dashboard in the control panel. This stream gives you an overall, up to the minute view of everything happening in your nation: who is creating pages, who is tweeting about broadcasters, who is signing up on the website, who just left a voice mail, etc. More specific streams based around people and pages appear in other parts of your control panel and public website.

All of the activities that appear in streams can be edited when you go to Settings > Activities in the control panel. On the right hand side of this page you'll see a series of columns. Each column is a different dashboard in NationBuilder and you can control what streams a particular activity appears on by going to the activity and clicking on EDIT. There, you'll see check boxes on the right side of the screen where you can choose what dashboards the activity appears on. 

When you create new pages for you public website, you have the option to check Show stream in the Settings tab for that particular page. If you add a stream to a page that stream is a public dashboard.  

The following code will display a paginated stream of the most recent public activities occurring in your nation:

{% for activity in site.activities %}
<div class="activity">
{{ activity.show }}
</div>
{% endfor %}

If you want to limit the stream to say, the latest 5 activities, you can modify the code as shown:

{% for activity in site.activities limit:5 %}
<div class="activity">
{{ activity.show }}
</div>
{% endfor %}

NationBuilder allows you to upload files to individual pages, or to your own custom theme. To use an image across your site, we recommend uploading it to your custom theme files and then right clicking to get the link to that file on our servers. You can then insert the image URL in the photo editor on other content pages.

NationBuilder allows you to store files like PDFs and images on a directory assigned to each page. You can also store files such as MP3s under the files director of a custom theme.

If you want to link publicly to a stored file, do so by right clicking on them and copying the link, then making it the hyperlink in the public pages. Your files each have their own URL that can be linked to on public pages. And if you want to make it so they automatically download when clicked, here are the instructions for that - http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-File-Downloadable-from-Your-Website.

Nationbuilder allows you to include a supporter navigation bar on your website pages. When someone is visiting the site for the first time this nav bar will appear with some basic information on it, such as your logo, a link to your volunteer sign-up page and donation page, a Facebook plugin, and a Twitter follow button (so long as these pages exist and these social media accounts have been connected). When someone logs into your website with their email, Facebook, or Twitter account, the supporter nav changes and users will be able to themselves on it as well as a selection of links to pages that they can go to.

The idea is that you want to create specific pages for your users to interact with you and each other on your website, enhancing the community aspect of your nation. What page types are included here is entirely up to you. NationBuilder includes some default page types here which give you an idea of how to make the most out of the supporter nav, these page include:

Dashboard- let's your users see an individualized stream of everything going on in your nation that pertains specifically to them, i.e., people they are following, pages they are following, pages they are a part of (event's they RSVP'd for), etc. 

Recruiting- Shows people that they have recruited to the nation and how many of those have become volunteers, donors, voters 

Leaderboard- Shows where they stand in comparison to other users 

Political Capital- How much political capital they've accumulated  

Follows/Followers- Other users from you website they are following or are following them 

Find Friends- allows them to find friends from their social networks who are also users on the website

Here are a couple of other ideas for what to include in the supporter nav:

-Create a suggestion box page for logged in users only, let them have input in the goals and principals of the nation.

-Create an events calendar for logged in users. Post meetings and events that are just for them. Allow users to create their own events here.

First, you need to have or create a custom theme. Next, customize your Twitter profile widget here. 

Once you're done, click the Finish & Grab Code button. If you copy and paste it into your NationBuilder _columns2.html template, the tweet stream will appear in the right column of your website. 

First, create a new donation page which will be used to sell tickets to your event. If you create a tracking code while on the Donation settings page, you'll be able to clearly track who has purchased tickets, how many, and how much money you've raised. 

Next, create and configure a new event page. When on Event details, check "Sell tickets" and select the donation page and donation tracking code you just configured. Then click on Advanced under Event details, and specify a tag for RSVPs. Finally, click Tickets to configure your ticket levels.

Later, you will be able to pull a lists or target everyone who RSVP'd for an email blast by using the RSVP tag you specified, and you can get a detailed breakdown of ticket purchases on the Finances page by selecting the tracking code you created. You can print a list of everyone who purchased a ticket to verify people at the door by clicking the RSVP button while editing your event page.

RSVPs will receive both an RSVP confirmation and donation receipt email. You can configure both of these emails on the donation and event autoresponse page respectively. 

In order to connect a NationBuilder event with a Facebook event, you must first create your event in the NationBuilder control panel. After creating your event page, or selecting an existing event page in the overview display, go to Event Details > Social Media. 

In the Social Media tab under Facebook there are two options. When you click on the Publish to Facebook button you will be taken to a new event page in Facebook identical to your NationBuilder event page. Keep in mind that whichever Facebook account you are logged in as at the time will be the creator of the event. So if you have a Facebook page for your organization, you want to be sure that you are logged into that account before you take this step.

The other option for connecting these events is to create your event page on Facebook independently of NationBuilder. Make sure the information about the two event pages matches up! Then go into the corresponding event page in NationBuilder and go to Event Details > Social Media. Right above the button that reads Connect to an existing Facebook event, enter the url of that event, and then click the button.

Once your NationBuilder event page is linked to a Facebook event page, anyone who RSVPs for the event on Facebook will show up in your control panel dashboard and event dashboard as an RSVP for the NationBuilder event (because the two events are one in the same!). This way you will always have an accurate RSVP count.

If you are running into spacing and formatting issues when using the NationBuilder content editor you are probably copying and pasting the text from another application. When you copy and past text from one application into the NationBuilder content editor what happens many times is that hidden html is attached to that text, and that can create issues with the formatting of your content.

In order to get around this, you can do a few things.

You can use the Paste from Word feature on the tool bar. You can copy and paste from Microsoft Word right into the clipboard, and click insert. Your text should be formatted and ready to go. 

You can also highlight all of the text in your content editor and then go to the drop down menu on the left hand side of the toolbar and select Paragraph. Chances are it was on Format before, and switching it over to Paragraph will allow you to make the necessary changes to your formatting. 

If all else fails, you can go into the html editor in the toolbar, and manually strip your content of any unnecessary html. 

Add the following to your theme.scss file:

.pc { display: none; }

You will need to be using a custom theme in order to access your theme.scss file. 

We've recently updated the default 404 "Page Not Found" error message to match the rest of your site theme and make it easy for visitors to navigate back if they enter a non-existent URL. If you'd like to customize the message they receive and your site has a custom theme, the file is under your pages theme "Misc Templates."

No. All NationBuilder sites are required to have the text "NationBuilder" and a link to NationBuilder.com in the footer of their home page. This credit is part of how we keep our prices low.

No, NationBuilder does not sell a service allowing others to brand our products as their own.