I've been road-tripping a bit lately, from CityCamp Raleigh in North Carolina to DC and Maryland for the InsideNGO annual meeting and the Health Data Initiative (rough #healthapps video here). This week, I'm out to Minneapolis for Netroots Nation. All this travel has me using NationBuilder's advanced filters a little more, searching and emailing local prospects and also poking around in the database of my personal Twitter followers to find local connections.

Using NationBuilder, I can ping my own Twitter follower list using an advanced search by location, then save the filter and sort it by Klout, follower counts, alpha, mutual follower and so on. This is useful to me for quickly identifying who I might want to meet up with in a particular area, and I can also quickly check our recent interactions on Twitter as well as any other contacts I've logged or actions they've taken on my site.

This application is even more valuable for things like multi-city events, concerts or book signings.

This of course works best if you've got a large database of email contacts, including city and state, and/or a robust Twitter following. For a multi-city tour, I would just ping my NationBuilder database for local Twitter followers, sort by Klout and then message 20 or so of my top contacts asking them to attend or promote my event. As long as your regularly contribute to your Twitter network, occasional requests like this can be pretty fruitful.

In DC, I set up several meetings after pinging our NationBuilder email database, and you can see above the kind of folks I would be thinking about while in DC. Last week I caught up with Jesse Thomas and Peter Corbett in person for the first time. Wearing a new JESS3 t-shirt as a I write this :)