To continue on NationBuilder, here are 25 cool ways you can use their CMS to grow your organization…
Beyond beautiful websites, NationBuilder has an insane amount of built-in tools for leveraging the passion of your volunteers and staff – at about the cost of simply hosting a website and the ease of a wordpress.com implementation.
Let’s take a look at what your non-profit or NGO can do with a basic $19 a month NationBuilder site:
• Tweets, Twitter ID and site URL mentions, Facebook and Meetup RSVPs and all on-site activities in a filterable administrative dashboard stream.
• Credit card donation pages, with affordable per transaction rates and goal thermometers for both donors and amount donated, automatic public recognition of recent donors, and auto-response thank you emails.
• Blogs! NationBuilder supports unlimited blogs pages and subnavigations, unlimited authors and granular settings for permissions and comments – including the ability to let any logged-in user submit a post. Plus Embedly integration for rich media publishing from more than 200 sites.
• Affordable fully integrated email blasting plans, with unlimited monthly messages to your lists.
• Cost-effective text blasting plans with the ability for folks to RSVP, pledge and sign up by texting keywords.
• Fully customizable calendar pages with upcoming events, optional user-submitted events, searching for nearby events and an overview map of all events. Plus multi-level ticket sales, and full integration with Facebook events and Meetup, RSVP auto-response emails with directions, and printable lists for the door.
• Show a map of your Meetup Everywhere communities with upcoming nearby meetups.
Volunteer signup with detailed contact info and custom asks for assignments like hosting an event, interning, or stuffing envelopes.
• Endorsement pages where individuals and/or organizations can publicly share their support and you can set a numerical goals and feature important endorsements.
• Templates for frequently asked questions, and crowdsourced and official responses.
• Free-form feedback pages for ‘tell your story’ campaigns and other submissions.
• A “find friends” feature for people to use their Facebook and Twitter accounts to connect with their friends and followers who have already joined.
• Leaderboard pages for recognizing top supporters from across the web. Try them with top supporters by day, week or month.
• Petitions with signature goals, comments, pictures, and the ability for supporters to choose whether to publish their signature on the site.
• An innovative and fully customizable “Political Capital” economy for measuring support levels and rewarding online actions like recruiting volunteers, signing pledges and donating. • Get creative and reward offline actions as well.
• Template pages for press releases.
• Recruiting features to help supporters find friends and track their involvement. Have they donated? Are they volunteering?
• Smooth redirects to any external pages and sites.
• Easy embed of iframes and sites like Tumbr.
• Customize and set up a rules page to help keep your nation civil.
• Crowdsource suggestions and allow people to comment.
• Solicit policy ideas around a particular topic and let people rate the ideas based on whether they are good, bad, impractical or important. Or you can crowdsource questions for an event.
• Customizable multiple choice surveys.
• Tight integration with Rock the Vote’s nationwide voter registration system. Voters will get printable forms they can mail in, and your nation documents email addresses of signups for follow-up.
• Moneybomb pages to turn fundraising drives into an event. Supporters can pledge an amount to donate at a very specific time and recruit others to do the same.
That’s a lot of power. What kind of nation will you build?
