NationBuilder Reviews

I used this in a political campaign that was separate from my day job. I love how this combines everything that I needed to run and win in one package. I not only gave me what I needed as the campaign's IT guy, it provided every single person involved with what they needed.

The biggest con (if you even want to call it one) is that NationBuilder is so finely-tuned towards political campaigns that it doesn't work well with things are unrelated to that. (Yes, I know that's not much of a con but that really is the only drawback that I could think of.)

By far the best feature of NationBuilder is that it is so widely used -- this means that any question you have as already been asked by someone else and a step-by-step help doc is likely an easy search away. It was really easy to get questions answered and problems solved in this way.

This software is more powerful than a tiny nonprofit like my own needs. It's also very, very expensive. The "newsfeed" type feature showing people who subscribed/unsubscribed/interacted in social media was strange and useless.

*Powerful CRM for non-profits and political organizations *Fantastic integration with social media. *CRM is great at identifying prospective supporters among multiple mediums such as social network, email, and webpage *Strong integrated communications tool that allows you to respond to engagements with your organization across multiple tools and automatically record your interactions within the individual user CRM profiles *CRM has a good clean up tool that helps you merge fragmented prospect information into one complete profile if it was not done automatically already by this tool. *Financial tool to track donation progress for your organization

*Overall tool feels restrictive and lacks some basic features *UI is inefficient and not friendly to use and is intuitive only to people already in the development industry who may find this cumbersome. Menus in menus in menus. *Support is mostly paid and seen as a key business driver for the organization other than development requests. This is a curious business decision considering the tools complexity...

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Customer Service is ALWAYS there to help you. Everything is easy to understand, of course there is a bit of a learning curve, the software is flawless.

Really it's hard to think of anything that doesn't work for us other than the pricing will be high for us as we grow.

I like having my website, email and donor info integrated into one place. It is an easy system to learn and the video tutorials are helpful, so it's easy to bring new members onto the team.

It isn't a superior product for any of its functions, particularly the donor database functionality. It is hard to get relevant info out of it to properly steward donors.

All of the core features of a CRM are there and functional, and I especially like that you can identify profiles as either people or organizations, a great feature when tracking contacts for partnerships and coalitions. There's a low learning curve for using the most basic elements of contact files and lists.

NationBuilder has a social feature to pull in any contact that interacts with you on social media. This is a nice idea in theory, but ended up creating a massive mess in the database, with thousands of duplicate contacts and/or contacts with no real contact information beyond the social media handle. This may be effective for a larger team with staff capacity to comb through information like this, but for a small nonprofit it was just too much.

Everything is in one solution at one low price. You can have all of your donors, volunteers and staff all in one database and have it manage your website and communications at the same time.

Knowing what to do with the data can be tricky and sticky. Also training your staff on how to use NB is hard - there's a big learning curve and many don't know that there are unlimited uses for the system.

I had my entire campaign and organizations tech on one platform rather than 4 different systems. NationBuilder's free trainings helped my organizers be succesful in using the system which helped me knock on more doors, make more phone calls and secure more donations.

The product hasnt been updated in a few years. Could use a face lift and some enhancements with the main functions.

We've had nation builder for a while now, the pros of the software are that it's got a lot of interesting features in it that can be manipulated with a bit of learning. Pages can be set up with simple widgets and accessibility for any information already captured.

The software itself is nice to have but we've been having issues in terms of integration. Some of the stuff on nation builder is unique and for us, it has been a challenge converting that information into something useful while maintaining our database. We've had times when our pages would crash and other times where things just didn't seem to pan out.

The search feature allows you to slice and dice your data in many ways.

Syncing with other platforms that it was supposed to sync seamlessly with turned into a major problem.

We were looking for a fully featured, integrated CRM and CMS system that was easy to get up and running at a price that a very small non-profit organization could afford. We found that NationBuider has with very powerful tools to help drive our success. In addition, the customer support is outstanding...from the videos to the very accessible support team, they go way above and beyond the norm to make sure you are well taken care of.

Like any software, there are constant updates to comply with new regulations and requirements. Although NationBuilder does a good job of explaining the changes, it still requires work to keep up.

For someone just beginning a campaign or just moving to a voter relations management platform, NationBuilder is a great way to start. The system has many, many features; but you don't need to use all of them right away. In addition, if you start with a small number of records (people in your data base) NationBuilder is quite inexpensive!

If I want to canvass door-to-door recording data on my phone, I'd need to link my NationBuilder data to a third party app. Otherwise, NationBuilder has all the features I need!

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Great concept, some of the system is built out really well (tagging contacts, web templates, integration of all services into a single database)

Way too incomplete. System is in serious need of a user experience upgrade - badly. It was extremely frustrating to figure out and some of the services required code-knowledge.

It is so easy to edit and update. Every time I need to create new information or change the Menu, it was no problem. The website always supported our club.

After a couple of years there were so many pages that it is a little tricky to find a specific page to update.

i like its ability to identify potential duplicate members to merge.

customer support and tech support has been terrible in resolving an issue. Has not been resolving the issue at all, just making rude emails about something else other than our issue.

NationBuilder is a one stop shop for CRM, Website and outreach needs. The customer support is incredibly diligent, you can tell that folks there care.

The UX is a bit of a mixed bag. They paper over the problems with supremely good customer support but there are definitely times I'd rather I'd been able to work out how to do the thing myself.

I love NationBuilder. It is a comprehensive political tools. You do not have a website? Within clicks you have one with NationBuilder. I love the contact management features, the mapping tools, the street and household views, the mass emailing tools, the contact log features. In short, I love everything with NationBuilder. Oh, I forgot to mentioned their outstanding dedicated customer support.

My only regret with NationBuilder is that the tools is getting more and more expensive to use. Their is also no free account available for small campaigns or candidates with limited budgets.

This software allows our very small non-profit organization to host our website and send email communications to our members and supporters.

We use NationBuilder to host our website for a very small non-profit organization, for which I am the Communications Chair. Granted, I have limited experience designing websites, but I have worked with several other web hosting services that provide MUCH more intuitive tools for both website and email design. The software is clunky, difficult to learn how to use, and does not produce very graphically appealing emails.

Thank you for your honest feedback! I recently wrote a blog post with some tips for designing emails - https://nationbuilder.com/how_do_i_create_a_newsletter_style_email_without_using_code - and you can join me Wednesdays for NationBuilder Live at 10am Pacific time - https://nationbuilder.com/live where we will go over it step by step! Email us at help@nationbuilder.com anytime if you have questions.

Tons of features, and a huge community to help.

A bit complex and takes some learning to figure it all out. But there are resources available to help.

NationBuilder has the capability to perform many functions. I am constantly discovering new functions and way to use it. One of our favorite features is tags, which allow us to mark contacts and easily sort them together out of thousands.

Editing the website hosted through our NationBuilder site is a pain to edit. I wish the process was smoother.

I've been using Nationbuilder for the past two years managing the email list for my nonprofit. It is easy to organize many different groups in our area using this software and its user interface is clean and easy to adapt to.

I come from the B2B world and am used to a lot of the features in Pardot, Marketo, or Hubspot so I find many of the limitations of this software a bit frustrating - no true automation or notifications to track engagement, no ability to organize contacts by engagement. I also found it limiting to not have some built in email templates to work with.

- The features (albeit tailored to political campaigns) are very comprehensive and well thought out. - For non-technical admins, it's very easy to create pages, add new content, and add new prospects or supporters to the CRM.

- Some seemingly simple things (like changing font types or colors) must be done within the CSS file (i.e. it can require technical knowledge). - Tutorial section is a bit cumbersome to navigate.

Great tool to engage customers but also fantastic CRM to increase customer interaction with my business.

Hard to complain about a great tool, but it has so much functionality it is hard to know if you are using its full potential