Nationbuilder - Room for Improvement

Nationbuilder is a terrific tool, giving basic campaign tools for a reasonable rate. However, as we go deeper into the tool, we find issues that should be addressed.

Some are basic, low priority issues with easy workarounds.Some are items that would make the product better.

Some are the type of design flaws which call to mind late nights, desperate programmers wired on Red Bull and dead end solutions.

In this site area, please add your issues or suggestions and have a look at those of your compatriots..

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Import Issue - import alerts and links

Sometimes it is the little things. In this case, on a small upload of 65 contacts from a CSV, 58 were shown as new contacts, 7 as updated and one as an error. The crazy thing is that I could click on 58 to get a list of the new contacts. I could click on the one error and get a CSV of the error and related issue. But to see the updates, I would have to do a more complex search. Not a big deal on a tiny update. Like many NB issues, it gets increasingly bad as the list scale. I think this is a brain fart.

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Email as a unique identifier

In every political list ever seen, there are duplicate email addresses. Most often, these represent couples who use the same email. Nationbuilder uses email addresses as unique identifiers and require importers to adjust data before import. They suggest adjusting the data to remove duplicate email addresses. This is terrible practice but acceptable for small campaigns. For political campaigns, it is not acceptable. Nationbuilder does not even allow the population of a second email via data import. All in all, this is a major weakness in the product.

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