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.