A review into the suitability of NationBuilder for NGO use in Australia.
March 2015
NationBuilder has an excellent set of ready-to-use people management tools for engaging supporters, but can it support the digital story-telling and regular-giving requirements needed by the NGO sector today?
In late 2014, I was asked to conduct a review into the suitability of NationBuilder for use by an NGO in Australia. NationBuilder describes itself as “The world’s first operating system for community(1)” and an end-to-end platform that “runs your whole site(2).” NationBuilder has been receiving a lot of attention in Australia recently. With permission, I’m making this version of the review public, as it may be helpful for those considering the platform.
The information in this review was obtained through online research, reading NationBuilder documentation, working with the back-end (control panel) and front-end of a NationBuilder site, several Skype calls and emails with NationBuilder representatives, and discussions with web development agencies familiar with NationBuilder.
The opinions expressed in this review are solely mine. Corrections are welcome — use the comments. A version of this review was provided to NationBuilder.
General Features
Pros
NationBuilder has a many excellent features which come ready-to-use. Rather than list them all here, see: http://nationbuilder.com/features. More than the features themselves, however, it’s the way they all work together in the one platform, that gives NationBuilder much of its appeal — it replaces three or four separate platforms you might be using for electronic direct marketing and managing your website and supporters.
The focus is on people — tracking their activity (both offline and online), volunteer organisation, event creation, donations, petitions and membership levels, to name a few — with tools designed to move people up a path of engagement.
NationBuilder helps identify potential leaders and gives them the tools they need to build and grow your movement. Used well, it can increase the productivity and effectiveness of human resources through:
- Centralised online volunteer signup and management
- Increased volunteer participation through online tools
- Supporter mobilisation through semi-automatic paths of engagement
- Supporter-driven and peer-to-peer activities
Cons
As a platform it was originally developed for political party organising, so some of its features may not be wholly suited for broader use (for example, Vote Pledge, Voter Registration, US Voter File, ActBlue integration).
At the time of writing, other features are not available out-of-the-box outside the US and Canada — e.g. text messaging and voicemail — however, for text messaging there may be work-arounds (involving third parties and associated costs).
Features have limited customisability. To get the most out of NationBuilder you need to do things the ‘NationBuilder way’. If your needs diverge, it may be difficult to customise the tools for your specific use-case.
One-Off Donations
Pros
For one-off donations (see below for regular giving), NationBuilder works with several Australia payment gateways including Stripe, eWay, Authorize.net, and PayPal. It doesn’t add any additional charge for donations, and handles the one-off donation process well. You can also enter donations manually for people who provide their details offline.
Cons
You have to use the NationBuilder donation platform which lives on a separate nationbuilder.org domain (rather than yourdomain.org.au). For example, when someone donates, they will go from yoursite.org.au to yoursite.nationbuilder.com/donate. If noticed, it might look a little unprofessional or be bad for user confidence, but it’s a relatively small thing.
Regular Giving
Pros
All online giving is handled outside NationBuilder by one of the supported payment gateways. This avoids any issues with PCI compliance and security, as the transactions all take place on the payment gateway and not on your site.
- Setting up an initial recurring donation can be made easy for the user.
- There are options for weekly, monthly or yearly regular giving.
- You can transfer existing donors from another system to NationBuilder (although you would need to ask them to opt-in — see below).
- You can enter donations manually for people who provide their details offline.
- Automatic actions (e.g. emails) can be setup for new memberships.
Cons
NationBuilder only supports Authorize.net, PayPal and PayPal Payflow Pro for regular giving. If your NGO is using another payment processor, you will need to switch in order to enable regular giving through NationBuilder. This is disappointing, considering there many market-leading payment processors with robust APIs, including Stripe and eWay (both popular in Australia) that aren’t supported.
“We don’t have a built out integration for recurring payments with eWay or Stripe at the mo[sic] and it won’t be built any time soon.”
— NationBuilder representative, 29 October 2014 (emphasis mine).
If your organisation requires regular giving but you don’t want to use Authorize.net or PayPal, you will need to handle the donations outside of NationBuilder, for example, by embedding or linking to an external payment system. Consider the following questions I posed to a NationBuilder representative, and their answers:
Qn: What happens if the recurring giving fails (e.g. a change in cc number)?
A: “The donor has to input new cc information since we don’t store that info in our system for security reasons.”
Qn: How would we handle existing givers?
A: You can transfer over donor history (http://nationbuilder.com/how_do_i_import_donor_history) but you’d have to ask them all to re-opt in (since we don’t have cc info in the database).
Qn: What if they want to increase or decrease the amount?
A: You would have to cancel their existing membership and have them sign up for a new one… We can’t account for changes in the amount a person gives on an existing recurring payment.
Qn: Can they change their card number? How?
A: They can’t do it from the front end for security reasons. You just need to donate again on the same page to update your details.
None of these issues are insurmountable, but they provide significant challenges for usability and organisational account-keeping.
Shopping Cart
NationBuilder does not have a native shopping cart. The NationBuilder representative I asked said that one was being worked on. No eta was given. However, there are third-party apps which can be used with NationBuilder to enable shopping cart functionality. These third-party apps would incur additional cost.
Editorial Content Publishing Tools
Pros
NationBuilder provides the ability to create multiple pages, blogs and posts (within blogs), with built-in settings for social media and search engine optimisation. You can preview changes, assign a status, and manage approval.
Cons
Many NGOs are putting a greater emphasis on story telling in their digital communications strategy. Effective and engaging digital story-telling requires good design in the way both copy and images are treated — and this needs to occur across all media devices (e.g. desktop, tablet, mobile).
This kind of digital story telling is facilitated by good content management, and at its core, that involves:
- clear content differentiation in the way data is stored, and
- easy to use publishing techniques for staff and volunteers.
Unfortunately, when it comes to editorial content, NationBuilder does not provide clear content differentiation and the publishing tools are not easy to use.
No separation of content types and no custom fields for content
There is no separation of content types when publishing content for ‘pages’ or ‘posts’ in NationBuilder. Text and images, for example, are put together in the editor, after-which there is no way to access or display them separately on the front-end. There are also no custom fields for use within pages or posts (only for donations and people).
This makes it difficult to output content on the front-end with fidelity to art direction or sensibility to different devices and methods of access.
Inflexible content management
Publishing ‘Page’ or ‘Post’ Content
Many other Systems:
- Get to the publish page in one click.
- All the workflow is on one page, no jumping around.
- Ability to provide customised instructions on the page.
- Customise the page for different user groups.
- Content authors can select customised pre-generated elements
when creating content (e.g. call-out boxes, highlighted
elements, information boxes, etc). - Live styles are applied to the editing window, so that
content is seen as it will appear. - The editor can be customised for consistency and
ease-of-use. - Unlimited custom fields, infinitely flexible.
- The author of the content can be defined any number of ways including through custom fields, and is distinct from the creator or publisher of the entry.
NationBuilder:
- 7 clicks to get to the publish page.
- Adding files is a separate process.
- Adding images is a separate process.
- No ability to provide custom instructions on the page.
- No ability to customise the page for different groups.
- No ability to customise the editor.
- No ability to provide customised design elements for the content creator. This limits the formatting options to NationBuilder’s pre-defined elements such as bold, italic, headings and block-quotes.
- Live styles are not applied to the editor
- No custom fields for editorial content.
- The page or post creator is assumed to be the author of the content.
- Authors must first be added as members in a separate process,
then they can be selected when creating the entry.
File Management
Many other Systems:
- Add files on the same page as content creation.
- Files can be shared internally throughout the site.
- Any number of files can be added to content.
- Files added on the back-end can be automatically listed on the front-end.
- There are distinct fields for the file url and the file name. This means they can be accessed separately and treated differently on the front end, for example, by displaying the title of a file, but limiting access to it.
NationBuilder:
- Adding files is a separate process.
- Files cannot be shared between posts, pages or content types.
- Files cannot be listed automatically on the front-end. To display the file on the front-end, the file must be first uploaded to the page, then the link has to be copied and then applied to text. On the back-end, this is cumbersome and time-consuming for content editors. On the front-end, it provides no design consistency.
Image Management
In NationBuilder, there is no ability to output one image at various sizes. This means:
- You can’t serve different images to different devices — for example, a smaller version for mobile devices — without uploading images for each device. You can still cause images to appear smaller, but the mobile device will still be downloading the same large image that desktop devices get. This is responsive but not mobile-first.
- You have fewer choices when it comes to art direction (one-size must fit all).
There is no ability to share images within the system.
In NationBuilder, each image you upload to a post or page is tied to that post or page. You can’t use the same image on other pages, events, or posts. If you want to use the same image you need to upload it again. This means, for example, where events share an image or are repeated, the same image will need to be added multiple times for each version of the event, and generic images can’t be utilised effectively.
Many other Systems:
- Add images in-situ.
- Images can be shared internally throughout the site.
- Easy, consistent, discrete image captions and attribution.
NationBuilder:
- Adding images is a separate process.
- Images cannot be shared between pages or other content types.
- No ability to easily, discretely and consistently provide
image captions or attribution.
I find the last point rather bizarre. What kind of web platform doesn’t let you caption images? You can’t associate a specific field of text (i.e. caption or attribution) with a particular image, because the fields provided don’t work (see below) and there is no ability to create a custom field for the purpose. You can add free-form text next to an image as its caption, but this is cumbersome for the publisher and provides no design consistency for the user. When I asked a NationBuilder representative about this, it got even stranger:
Note: ‘Liquid’ is the open source template language used by NationBuilder, originally developed by Shopify.
Me:
I have a question regarding images:
When uploading an image, there is a “description” field.
How can I access this with liquid templates in order to display an image caption?
NationBuilder:
In terms of the description field for uploading images, the caption is not available from liquid. I’ve asked around and that’s where we’re at.
I thought it was unlikely that the caption would not be available from liquid, so I asked the developers of liquid. Their answer indicated that it wasn’t a limitation of liquid.
After a few more emails, the final answer I received was:
“The only way(s) to currently add captions would be through CSS or javascript — i.e. loading your own javascript library.”
Something as basic as providing image captions shouldn’t be beyond NationBuilder’s capacity, especially when the image upload dialogue has a field specifically for “description” — it should be possible to output this on the front-end using liquid, as you can with other fields.
This has been a feature request for at least 2 years, which leads me to question how NationBuilder responds to the needs of its users.
Social Media
Pros
Social media in NationBuilder is well integrated as part of its people-focused tools, giving you rich insights into your supporters, and giving them multiple ways to engage with your organisation:
- Social sign in. Visitors can instantly sign in with Facebook or Twitter.
- Social Profiles. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn info added to supporter records.
- Facebook Sync. Connect events with Facebook to sync RSVPs.
- Match emails with social networks. Match your email list to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Klout.
Easy commenting with built-in or third-party systems. NationBuilder has an in-built commenting system which works well with its other in-built tools. It also allows for third-party commenting systems. There are pros and cons of using, for example, Facebook for comments, or using NationBuilder’s built-in system. Unfortunately you can’t combine the two.
Easy activity sharing. NationBuilder makes it easy to prompt users to share their engagement, for example, if they sign-up to volunteer, or make a donation, they can be prompted to share that activity through social media.
Cons
Adequate but inflexible content sharing. With NationBuilder, users can share content on social media the same way they can on most sites. Due to the inflexible nature of its content entry system, NationBuilder isn’t very robust in the richness of the information it can share, for example:
- You can’t practically provide different images that are tailored specifically for Facebook or Twitter, because there is no native way to output one image at various sizes.
- When providing users with the ability to share your image — for example, on Pinterest — you can’t suggest a description by pre-populating the field for them, as NationBuilder doesn’t have the ability to caption images in a way which allows that data to be accessed separately.
Recommendations for NGOs
What are your needs?
Are you strategically focused on supporter engagement — especially peer-to-peer activities — and in a position to utilise the tools NationBuilder provides? Can you adapt to NationBuilder’s donation mechanisms? Is precise control over the presentation and social sharing of editorial content less of a concern? Then I highly recommend NationBuilder.
If you need finer-grained control over editorial content, or if your expectations or internal donation processes don’t fit well with NationBuilder (especially for regular giving), you will need to carefully consider whether the costs outweigh the benefits.
Are you new or established?
If you have the opportunity to start your systems and processes from scratch with NationBuilder, it’s a great way to get up-and-running quickly with some powerful tools that are suited for growth.
If you already have an established donor database and associated systems which you want to keep, you could use only some features of NationBuilder as applicable, or you could transition to NationBuilder as your central data repository going forward. Either way, if you can’t use only NationBuilder, you will need to develop a way to synchronise donor data.
“When choosing a platform you need to be so strategic to ensure you get something that will stand the test of time as your organisation grows. NationBuilder offers so many great tools in the one platform, but you need to consider and strategise around how you’re going to use and employ these tools best. If you start trying to hack together a solution that is focused solely on your organisation’s goals without considering in a detailed way how NationBuilder fits into that, you’ll be met with some challenges.” — Lara Ihnatowicz, Agency
Recommendations for NationBuilder
Escalation of Issues
I had a very good experience with all the NationBuilder representatives I came into contact with. They were all courteous, quick to respond to emails, and punctual on calls. I found somewhat frustrating, the to-and-fro it took to get some non-basic questions escalated to a level where they could be authoritatively answered. If this could be done quicker it would be a better experience.
Content Editor
NationBuilder uses an old version of the open source Tinymce editor. It would do well do pay for a more modern editor as has been suggested by its users, or at least update its version of Tinymce.
Page and Post Information Architecture
NationBuilder has put a great deal of thought and effort into the architecture behind its people-focused tools for supporter engagement. The same thought needs to be put into the content management tools for pages and posts, which seem like a hasty last-minute addition. In particular, different types of content should be able to be stored, accessed and output distinctly, and the editing experience should be easier and customisable.
