What's new at NationBuilder

My Obsession with Stories

Six months ago someone asked me to share my story. I’ve made story maps and timelines before, but had never shared my story to a near stranger. I started thinking about my personal narrative and realized the way my life in...

Why you should be taking advantage of Blueprints

As a NationBuilder Architect, your design is a calling card. It's how customers differentiate styles and determine which flavor fits best with their mission. The subjective nature of it all means this decision can be made ...

How to use tech for constituent engagement

Whether it's on the congressional level or the municipal level, NationBuilder puts people at the center of your website and communications tools, so you can keep track of projects and constituents without letting anythin...

Find the Export Button: Why it's important to own your own data

In June of 2013, a blogger by the name of Bohemea lost 2 blogs, 100,000 pieces of content, and 150,000 followers in an instant, without warning. No, it wasn't a cyber attack or vengeful hacker or because she accidentally h...

Talib Kweli makes the case for why every creator should take control of their own financial destiny

Brooklyn born hip-hop artist Talib Kweli recently wrote an article titled, “Why I Left The Major Label System,” and I’ve read it several times. Not because Kweli is brave enough to call out a number of instances in which m...

How to build a proactive donor community

As 2014 came to a close, we talked about how to create momentum for successful year-end giving. In the new year, I’d like to shift our focus from one-off donations and annual campaigns to more year-round giving. And it sta...

Creating themes for growing ecosystems

The initial hesitation I almost always receive from web designers is "What is the difference of creating themes on NationBuilder versus a platform I'm already comfortable with?". This is a superb question. It's also one of...

Music is Community Organizing

After high school I tried to become a rock star. This is the story of how the band went from 1 to 300 fans in Las Vegas.

Top 5 reasons humans > robots

894,309 new volunteers recruited 116,841 events coordinated 13,766,807 one on one interactions 47,286,268 new supporters and $241,549,176 raised (more or less - some of that is euros, pounds and other currencies) C...

Close out 2014 with new advanced donor targeting

If you’re a nonprofit fundraiser, this has been a busy month. Whether you’ve devoted your time to painstakingly crafting the perfect year-end fundraising email or discovering new saliva reserves to seal hundreds of envelop...

Your annual report, created with NationBuilder

It's the time of year that many of you are jamming on year-end fundraising efforts while trying to find the time to put together an annual report so your board can see all the progress you’ve made this year. At NationBuil...

How to write a year-end fundraising email that actually works

I’ve written tons of emails in the last few years, and my favourite email appeals always go out at the end of the year. It’s the perfect time to connect with your supporters, reflect on the past, and ask them to invest in ...

Faith Driven Consumer's fast growing community

How Faith Driven Consumer grew from a small group of supporters to a national movement. When Chris Stone set out to create a new kind of digital community in the summer of 2013, he had big goals. “There are more than 41 m...

New API paging

Paging with the NationBuilder API can be very slow so we improved it and now it is 3x faster (5x in some cases). Over the past few months I have worked with several developers to move over to the new pagination and now th...

Improvements to page preview tools

Creating a website is hard. Getting it right is even harder. Is the font right? Is the alignment off? We understand how difficult it can be and want to make it easy for you to preview and see recent site changes. In that s...