What's new at NationBuilder

How to run a cutting-edge digital field campaign with NationBuilder

I work with a lot of political customers, and I often hear, “NationBuilder is a great system for engaging with people online, but can you really use it to run a field campaign for a major election?” The answer, of course, ...

Find donors who haven't contributed recently

The response to the new advanced search + targeting has been great, and based on your feedback, we realized there was one important thing missing: relative date searches. Instead of having to search for a specific date, ...

Local candidates using NationBuilder win big

Last night, several municipal candidates earned victories in their local races. In Malibu, Laura Rosenthal was re-elected after sweeping the vote for Malibu City Council, while Robert Garcia, the city's first openly gay ca...

Digital precinct captains: distributing power through your organization

During the ‘08 presidential primary, precinct captains in Massachusetts were given access to voter data from a previous race - the ‘06 gubernatorial - for the first time. No one knew it then but this move had a huge impact...

Your nations are protected from the Heartbleed bug

As you may have heard, a major security flaw in internet security known as Heartbleed was uncovered on Monday. The internet community sprung into action and a fix was made available immediately, which we implemented in al...

Using NationBuilder to engage the people who care about what you’re doing

In his first run for office, Dan Futrell earned a spot on the School Board of Somerville, Massachusetts, representing Ward 2—a district where 68% of the students are from low-income households. Prior to the election, Futre...

Using Obama-style field organizing to rethink university alumni outreach

image courtesy of Flickr In 2008 I wasn’t a very good alum. I’d graduated three years prior, and yet, I had never given money to my alumni association, never attended an alumni event and - after moving several times -...

Staged donation pages

For years, donation pages on the internet looked the same. You know what I’m talking about. And because people knew what to do when they saw one, standard donation pages became the norm. Then the Obama campaign went crazy ...

Big upgrade to the People API

We've greatly expanded the fields you can access through the People API - adding more information on social media accounts, work, multiple email accounts for a person, invoice history, voter IDs and much more. There are no...

Stop building lists. Start building relationships.

Previously a nonprofit executive, I too suffered from the pandemic that is “list building”—the constant drive to accumulate as many email addresses, social media “likes” and followers as possible, and the ongoing crusade t...

How community organizing tools help entertainers take control of their creativity

The art of community organizing is a hit in the entertainment industry. Artists looking for resources beyond a manager or agent have discovered new ways to directly connect with their audiences. Comedians Jamie Kennedy an...

New: Test tokens

If you're looking to build an app for use by a large number of nations, you start by using OAuth2 to request tokens for accessing those nations. But if you're testing initial scripts or are using the API for a single natio...

Presence - our newest theme!

We have a new website theme for you—Presence—our second responsive theme in addition to Aware. From desktop to tablet to mobile phone, Presence elegantly adapts to different screen sizes AND it features a completely redesi...

New feature: multiple choice custom fields

NationBuilder’s people database is dynamic and customizable. We released custom fields last year and one of the biggest requests was to have a multiple choice option. So, we’ve added multiple choice in addition to the ex...

Donations updates and webhooks versioning

We're happy to report that the NationBuilder Donations API now supports write access. We've also added a number of new resources for managing donations. The donations webhooks payload has also been updated to reflect the...