I get called nearly every single day with the same question: “What do you think of NationBuilder?” I got one text, two emails and a big group listserve email on Christmas Eve alone, so I’m going to finally post my thoughts publicly.

I’m no certified NationBuilder expert (yes, that’s a real thing), but I just ran the digital strategy for Ken Cuccinelli’s gubernatorial campaign, along with their day-to-day digital director, and I’m pretty sure it was the largest and most active campaign yet to be run on the platform, so I think I can speak with some expertise. Or, at a minimum, I can tell you about our experience.

Let me start by saying that I will not get into the partisan aspect of the platform, which is a huge deal that I could write pages on, but I will say this — the creators are liberal and the platform connects to mostly democratic systems. The folks at the RNC don’t like NationBuilder at all and will most likely not be allowing the system to connect to their new data systems. We tried building our really cool microtargeted Facebook app by connecting NationBuilder, RNC data, Facebook data and our internet microtargeting data. After numerous conference calls, the RNC and NationBuilder folks couldn’t come to an agreement about data sharing. I doubt they ever will.

NationBuilder is trying to be a nonpartisan system, but in politics, that just isn’t going to happen — just like my company, Push Digital, would never be able to help candidates of both sides. That’s politics. It’s the industry you’ve chosen. Deal with it.

Now on to the platform itself.

I wish the folks at NationBuilder all the luck in the world. I like them a lot and I believe, given the money they’ve raised, they will have a lot of success. Their customer service has been terrific and in particular, I believe Adriel Hampton and Ian Patrick Hines (who is no longer there but did great work for us this cycle) are terrific. A lot of folks say it’s the best platform on the market. I agree, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I firmly believe they can take the award for being the least shitty of all the shitty platforms. Congratulations NationBuilder!

Earlier today, I read a Medium post by Bonobos.com CEO Andy Dunn in which he writes:

“A lot of brands don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right. Why are they in such a hurry…

…Consumers don’t need many things from your brand —they just need one thing from your brand. You may want them to need everything from your brand, but guess what: consumers don’t care what you want. Your job is to care about what they want, not what you want them to want. The difference between the two is the distance between a customer-centric company and an ego-centric company…

…Make one thing great. Get one thing right. That earns you the right to go from product one to product two. Take as much time as you need to get product one right, and to prove it—because if you don’t, no one is going to be waiting on pins and needles for product two.”

That perfectly summarizes my opinion of NationBuilder. They are trying to do too much at one time when they should try to crush one thing and then move on.

NationBuilder wants to be a campaign in a box, fulfilling many campaign needs. But why? WordPress is going to be the leading website platform. There are a ton of great email systems already on the market. Why try to be those things? In trying to do everything, NationBuilder is a clunky mess with one of the worst UIs I have ever worked with.

But there is one massive hole in politics no one is filling that NationBuilder has the upper hand on — data.

Everyone is talking about data. It has been the buzzword since fall of 2012. But a year later, no one has done a damn thing. No platform exists to tackle our data issues while every political consultant and digital firm is promising a solution. Here we are moving into the 2014 cycle and still, NOTHING.

If I were the CEO of NationBuilder, here is what I would do:

1. Scrap the website platform, email system and everything else that isn’t all about data.

2. Become the Google of politics by building the largest voter database in the world. Build the votergraph.

3. Connect to everything and become the central hub of campaign data. Connect to every website platform, every form app, every donor system, every email system, every social network, every consumer data platform, every ad platform, every everything so that all data can be imported into one central database.

4. Combine all that data into voter profiles.

5. Build analytical tools to analyze and segment all that data.

6. Like #3, connect to every tool you can allowing users to export lists to voter contact systems — email, ad networks, etc…

7. Produce a clean and sexy UI that doesn’t take weeks to learn.

Nationbuilder should stop trying to solve problems already solved and solve the problem no one has solved. They have the talent. They have the money. But they also have the wrong objective.

In its current form, I won’t be using NationBuilder on anything larger than a congressional campaign in 2014. I sincerely hope that changes in future cycles. In the meantime, I plan on giving votergravity.com a test run. I’ll let you know what I think soon.

Happy New Year!