NationBuilder describes itself as “Software for Leaders.” Since its public release in 2011, it has become a dominant player in the political campaign and issue advocacy space. The primary reason NationBuilder has been so successful is that it provides an organization with virtually every tool needed to run a campaign. There are more than 30 pre-built page types. The platform allows you to take online donations, recruit volunteers, manage events, create walk and call lists, send blast emails and texts, manage your voter file, identify voters, organize your GOTV efforts and much more. It also enables your campaign to organize and utilize data using tags, filters, goals and paths.

Why is this so important? The one finite quantity in every campaign is time. And while not necessarily finite, another element that is too often in short supply is money. Why risk wasting either? You don’t want to waste time calling or door-knocking voters who aren’t going to vote for you or, even worse, who have already told you they will. Imagine the cost of sending of voter persuasion mailer to 10,000 voters you have already identified as yes votes. Yes, big-data and voter modeling is becoming increasingly accessible to down ballot races but it’s money wasted if you don’t do small-data and voter data management well.

NationBuilder is, in essence, a “campaign in a box”...and that’s very powerful because it means all of your data is located in one place. It can also be a problem because it’s a big box with a lot of stuff inside. In this series of articles, we will try to unpack that box. We’ll explain what we believe are the essential capabilities of NationBuilder and demonstrate how you can use them to give you an advantage over your opponent.

Let’s get started.

While the first two tasks aren’t NationBuilder, they inform everything a campaign is going to do between now and Election Day. You have to determine your “Votes-To-Win” (VTW) number which will give you a good estimate on your “Dollars-To-Win.” I will address Dollars to Win first as it is really just a multiple of Votes to Win. You should figure you’re going to need between $10 and $15 per vote. Have candidates won with less? Sure, but while I enjoy working with “grassroots” campaigns, I much prefer working with grassroots campaigns that also have adequate funding. (Note: A campaign budget is based on what you need to spend, not on what you think you can raise.)  

To get your VTW, you are going have to look at past election results. While there are too many variables to analyze here, three important things to consider are:

1. The number of candidates (particularly in primaries)
2. The participation of an incumbent (currently or in comparable past elections) and
3. The presence of elections or ballot initiatives that might affect turnout.

As a note on whether or not there is an incumbent in the race, years ago I was the Comms Director in a mayoral race in a small city. I was chatting with the two front runners before a debate and mentioned that I thought it would take 4,000 votes to make the general election. They thought I was crazy saying that there hadn’t been more than 5,200 votes cast in the last five primaries. I pointed out those races all involved a sitting incumbent. On primary night, they both moved on to the general, one with 4,300 votes and the other with 4,022.

I won’t go deep in the weeds about How to set up your election in NationBuilder as there is very good documentation over at NationBuilder.com/Support. It is very important that you go to Dashboard>Settings>Enable Voters to unlock all the capabilities built into NationBuilder for political campaigns.

The next thing you want to do is have NationBuilder import your voter file into your Nation. The import and information is free but it will increase the cost of your Nation under NationBuilder’s pay as you grow pricing. I will get further into How to use Filters and Filters vs Lists vs Tags in the 3rd article of this series but you will want to use filters to identify your high-propensity/likely voters and then export and delete the rest. That way you’re not paying for database records of voters you are not targeting. Every race is different and state election laws differ as well so how you choose your voter universe will too. As an example, if you are running in a party primary in a state where voting is restricted to party members and undeclared voters, you probably don’t need voters who are outside that universe.

Now that you have narrowed your voters universe, I recommend you enhance that data with commercial and demographic data that syncs with your voter file. This is important because it helps you better identify your likely voters and more precisely target your efforts, especially if you have a large percentage of unenrolled voters. Also, as your campaign successfully identifies both supporters and non-supporters, you are going to create clear pictures or profiles of those groups allowing you to focus relatively more resources on prospective voters who look like your known supporters.

So you have your Votes to Win and Dollars to Win numbers. You also have your pool of targeted voters. In the next article, I will discuss using Point Persons and Permission Sets to organize not only to create workflows for your campaign but also to identify the voters you need to win your election.

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FourTier Strategies is a national, political digital agency. Brad Marston, is Co-Founder and Partner and is a NationBuilder Certified Expert and Architect. 

In this edition of Campaign Hacks, Tricks and Tips, we'll be discussing effectively merging your digital and field strategy, how NOT to manage your social media accounts and the latest product update from NationBuilder.

Two Candidates Walk Into A Bar

Is this a joke?

No. In fact, if you are running for office, it is very serious. Our hope is to briefly explain how digital strategy and field strategy no longer operate in separate “silos”...and how the campaigns that best merge the two will be more efficient, effective and ultimately, more successful.

So back to our two candidates. They both walk into a bar and inside are 100 people who live in the district. Obviously, they both want to do the three jobs of a candidate; meet voters, secure votes and raise money. The challenge is that they only have 30 minutes. 

One candidate starts working the room introducing himself and, hopefully, listening to people’s concerns. That is traditional “field.” Candidate 2 [C2] knows that of the 100 people in the bar, only 80 are registered to vote. Given that they are running in a primary, C2 also know which of those 80 voters are members of their party and so can vote for them. C2 also knows which of those voters have voted in at least three of the last four primaries. C2 knows who of those 20 or 30 voters own their home, have a net worth over $500,000 and have donated to past political campaigns. C2 looks for those specific voters and starts implementing her strategy. That is effectively merging field and digital.

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3 Reasons Candidates Should NOT Manage Their Own Social Media Accounts

A political candidate has three jobs:

1. Raise money.

2. Meet voters.

3. Secure support.

Everything else should be delegated, including social media.

I could explain why so many candidates ignore this 101-level advice, but I’ll save that for another time. For the purposes of this post, I’ll address the headline directly.

Reason 1: It sends the wrong message.

With a few notable exceptions, candidates who manage their own social media accounts are unwittingly screaming to the world that they are not viable. After all, it’s not very expensive to hire a competent social media vendor these days. Candidates who refuse to delegate this task are generally either broke, narcissistic, or a combination thereof. Those who don’t fit into these categories are receiving and following bad advice.

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Find your people and pages faster with the improved quick search

At NationBuilder, they believe leadership starts with putting people at the center of everything you do. Today, they’re making it even easier to find, update, and further engage those people by displaying results as soon as you start typing in quick search.

Type in a name, email, NationBuilder ID or Twitter ID in the search box and select a profile to edit right from the drop-down. By starting all your profile-related work from quick search you’ll reduce the likelihood of creating a duplicate and save yourself time later. If you can’t find who you’re looking for, you can also create a new profile in one click.

READ MORE

Have a campaign or project you would like to discuss? LET'S TALK.

Is this a joke?

No. In fact, if you are running for office, it is very serious. Our hope is to briefly explain how digital strategy and field strategy no longer operate in separate “silos”...and how the campaigns that best merge the two will be more efficient, effective and ultimately, more successful.

So back to our two candidates. They both walk into a bar and inside are 100 people who live in the district. Obviously, they both want to do the three jobs of a candidate; meet voters, secure votes and raise money. The challenge is that they only have 30 minutes. 

One candidate starts working the room introducing himself and, hopefully, listening to people’s concerns. That is traditional “field.” Candidate 2 [C2] knows that of the 100 people in the bar, only 80 are registered to vote. Given that they are running in a primary, C2 also know which of those 80 voters are members of their party and so can vote for them. C2 also knows which of those voters have voted in at least three of the last four primaries. C2 knows who of those 20 or 30 voters own their home, have a net worth over $500,000 and have donated to past political campaigns. C2 looks for those specific voters and starts implementing her strategy. That is effectively merging field and digital.

Welcome to the first edition of FourTier Strategies' periodic newsletter on "best practices" for campaigns, issue advocacy organizations, PACs and non-profits. 

We will be offering our own insights, information on new campaign related Apps and Integrations as well as updates to our platform of choice, NationBuilder. If you would prefer to not receive these emails, just click here to unsubscribe.

Campaigns Don't Plan To Fail. They Fail To Plan.

In the private sector, startup companies often spend months developing business plans. That intensive but necessary process includes a significant amount of research...and that research is critical to the development of effective strategies and tactics.

Most political campaigns are like business startups and the candidates are essentially new “products.” We published a blog post a couple of years ago “Ten Questions To Ask Before Running For Office.” Assuming you can ask and adequately answer those questions, the next question is “Now what?”

The answer? Plan, Plan, Plan. 

The first number you need to know is “Votes To Win.”

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TOP TECH

Introducing VoterCircle

Political campaigns large and small, want to reach voters and secure votes. They want to do this as effectively and efficiently as possible. The most effective method is a multi-touch approach, combining phone and door-to-door canvassing, digital advertising and peer-to-peer communication. The most efficient methods focus on encouraging and empowering your supporters to grow your campaign, your email list and supporter network organically while focusing on people who can actually vote for you.

VoterCircle is a friend-to-friend outreach platform that dramatically reduces the time and cost of reaching voters. The traditional outreach paradigm is cold campaign-to-voter outreach. VoterCircle changes that paradigm to enable warm personalized friend-to-friend outreach at scale.

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NATIONBUILDER FEATURE UPDATE

Build Your Organization With Improved Events Management

NationBuilder has streamlined its Event Management process. You can now edit event settings at the calendar level and apply them to all events and filter for people who RSVP’d, attended, or hosted a specific event. This makes it easier to run lots of events on NationBuilder, either events submitted by your community or created by your organization.

Events let you engage your community and strengthen relationships. Doing them right takes a lot of work. The more events you host, the more of your time this work takes up. We wanted to make sure you could capture the best data about your event rsvp’ers and attendees, without having to do a whole bunch of repetitive work every time you created an event.

We’ve created calendar-wide event settings to simplify the process of setting up an event in NationBuilder. If you use user-submitted events, or if you’ve got lots of people in your organization creating events, calendar event settings allow you to set the tags, paths, point people, and memberships applied by those event pages once at the calendar level rather than having to do it every time you create an event.

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Have a campaign or project you would like to discuss? LET'S TALK.

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