One of the great things about NationBuilder is seamless integration between the content features of your website (content management system or CMS) and an interactive database (customer relationship management system or CRM). However, if your group already has a website and wants to use NationBuilder's action tools or database, or wants to integrate with an external action, that's easy to do with NationBuilder as well.
I recently worked through integration of NationBuilder with Ohio Citizen Action, which already had a well-developed WordPress site when they started using our database and email blasting tools, and for NationBuilder customers participating in global actions related to Occupy Wall Street. For organizations using NationBuilder, key concerns include building supporters' lists and making NationBuilder action pages look like existing sites. You can do that with hyperlinks, custom SCSS, intro text, activity chains and redirect page types.
- NationBuilder does not yet have widgets for embedding action pages, but you can use <iframe> HTML tags to do so. And if your website has join, donate or volunteer links or buttons, just set those to direct to corresponding NationBuilder pages.
- Making NationBuilder pages look like your main website is usually a matter of replacing the header and doing a little SCSS styling. To unlock the theme editor in NationBuilder, just clone one of the basic themes ("Paper" is one of the most simple) and then you can edit the colors and styling in the "theme.scss" file. You can also replace the header with a custom logo in the file "layout.html." You can learn in our theme documentation.
- If you have a NationBuilder site where you want to keep your own look and feel but want to integrate signups with another group's action, you can easily set up a new "Signup," "Endorsement," "Event," or "Petition" page and just customize the intro text with logos, photos and/or explainer text.
- Activity chains are a great feature in NationBuilder for moving visitors and supporters through desired actions. Many NationBuilder page types allow you to specify which page someone should go to after completing that action. With Ohio Citizen Action, we worked to integrate key page types such as Signup, "Volunteer" and "Donate," and to bring people back to the home WordPress site after they completed the desired actions.
- NationBuilder also has a "Redirect" page type, which can be used to send folks to other sites while also incorporating into an activity chain. You can create a "Home" tab in your top navigation which leads to an external site and also functions so that after someone donates on NationBuilder they are atuomatically sent to that page. For nations participating in Occupy Wall Street/We Are the 99 actions, you could customize a Signup page and have it automatically direct to a URL specificed with a Redirect page.
If you have questions about integrating NationBuilder action pages with your site, leave them in the comments and we'll do our best to help.
UPDATE: If you're looking to convert your home site to NationBuilder's CMS to better integrate social media, database tools and our action tools, a NationBuilder Expert could help you make the move and a NationBuilder Architect could create a custom website experience for your organization. We also have a growing list of apps to deepen your organizing connections. In particular, our legacy URL import tool and the Veracity WordPress Importer can help ease the transition from another CMS to NationBuilder.
