NationBuilder

"Makes leading a movement possible"

Overall: It's a great experience overall. The one thing that I wanted to add is that when I did have to call their tech support line with a problem, they were able to resolve everything quickly and easily.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.)

"Great concept, but execution needs work"

Pros: *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

Cons: *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 and target market and likely leads to low retention rate among organizations who trial it. They are focused on tier 1 customers. *Support for Events is very elementary. The tool is useful on small events only when tickets are involved, unless you want to use pen and paper check in's. There is no app support for check ins, no scannable tickets, and checking in requires a computer and many many clicks per person. *Very restrictive HTML support that blocks external integrations and embedding on your web page. This seems to have been a business decision to encourage paid development in their business model. *No native discussion/forum support is a key missed opportunity for engagement with the CRM. They have a work around with suggestion box but its sub standard and would make encouraging debate difficult as its not the core of its design. *Email campaign support is very elementary and difficult to use and test. Support for external tools such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact is very limited. Mailchimp contact sync is availabe and thats all. *Financial tool is missed opportunity due to lack of integration features with payment processors to import transactions and link them to people within CRM *Membership tool is poorly designed and makes managing paid membership difficult as a fundraising option within this tool without manual input.

"Too Early To Tell"

Overall: I have been using NationBuilder for a charity that I volunteer for now for about 8 months. At first I hated it because it seemed like it was very constricting but then I grew to like it. It includes a lot of features for organizations or groups who need a tool that includes everything in one place. It includes an email tool, your website, a crm and even social media measurement data for records. The reporting features and ways to pull people by tags can get sticky but overall I think they offer the future of what people need with this solution.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.