NationBuilder

06/17/2026

Money makes a lot of charity leaders uncomfortable.

But it shouldn't.

Line Kristensen, Account Executive at NationBuilder, knows this firsthand. She has spent fifteen years leading teams across UK charities, political campaigns, and commercial environments. From that experience, she's breaking down the five nonnegotiable financial habits every charity leader should build.

Read the full blog here:

Most nonprofits send the same email to everyone. Here's how audience segmentation, smart fields, and email automation can fix your nonprofit email marketing strategy without adding hours to your week.

06/17/2026

The most effective membership recruitment strategy isn't about your pitch. It's about their passion. Damiën Storimans, political organizer at D66, breaks this down in our latest webinar, where we brought together the researchers and practitioners behind The Future of Membership. Our independent research study, made in collaboration with Brand Response, explores what actually drives membership growth today.

Watch the full 45-minute conversation on demand here: https://bit.ly/42EcuDd

06/14/2026

Seven years ago, Gabrielle Glass co-founded a nonprofit with a few friends. She learned to write bylaws, build a board, and run on grit. But the one thing she wishes she'd known from day one?

How to email.

In our latest blog, Gabrielle, support tech at NationBuilder, shares the strategy she'd hand to her past self:

1. Stop sending one email to everyone. Your donors, volunteers, and new supporters each need to hear something different, so build an intentional list for each

2. Create templates and schedule emails in advance to get actual hours back in your week

3. Personalize every email the way you'd greet someone at an event: by name, with genuine appreciation for what they've given (don't worry, there are tools to help automate this process too)

If you're running a nonprofit where it feels like everyone wears six hats, this one's for you:

Most nonprofits send the same email to everyone. Here's how audience segmentation, smart fields, and email automation can fix your nonprofit email marketing strategy without adding hours to your week.

06/11/2026

The orgs getting the most out of AI aren't the ones using it the most. They're the ones using it most intentionally.

But what does intentional actually mean in practice? In our latest blog, three NationBuilder partners share what has actually worked in the field:

Jonathan Rivera (Alumni Nations) says teams are already sitting on more content than they realize. A policy brief, a donor email, a speech — with the right prompt, each one can become a blog post, social captions, a FAQ, canvassing talking points, etc. AI can give teams the bandwidth to maximize what they already have.

Phil Melin (Why Impact Strategies) says start with your "why" before you touch AI. Feed it your mission, your origin story, your theory of change, then let it produce anything supporter-facing. Without that foundation, you're just chasing output.

Pamela Campbell (Made by Pumpkin) ran three full website audits in one week with AI doing 75% of the work. Her warning: AI is a yes-person. Build in a human review step or you'll publish something that sounds right but isn't.

Explore the full breakdown (and a plug-and-play prompt your team can use today):

From AEO discoverability to content repurposing, here's how advocacy orgs, campaigns, and nonprofits are using AI effectively without losing what makes their work human.

05/28/2026

We'll be on the ground next week for the Oslo Freedom Forum! Come say hi to Maddy from our London team if you are attending. We’re excited to be live with this global community of human rights activists. 🇬🇧🌍

05/28/2026

One of the most compelling tools any mission-driven movement can leverage is the power of interconnected relationships.

EveryLibrary Co-Founder Patrick Sweeney learned this firsthand. He shared a story with us of a mayor who spoke out publicly against libraries. A library director knew his wife would be at a local barbecue.

"She purposely sat next to her and talked about library services for young mothers,” says Sweeney, “because she knew that's what the wife cared about. We know it got back to the mayor, because he never said another word about libraries again. She never had to talk to the mayor. She just had to talk to the mayor's wife. That was the power of the network."

This is the idea behind power mapping, a community organizing technique that turns relationships into strategy. Find the hidden pressure points that make change happen from unexpected places.

To do this at scale, EveryLibrary uses NationBuilder's people profiles to log relationship types to map the networks around decision-makers, identifying who influences a politician, who their donors are, and which supporters are in a given zip code who want to get more involved.

Power mapping is just one part of how EveryLibrary thinks about advocacy. But it's the combination of tools, strategy, and community organizing that has helped their members secure $3.2 billion in library funding at the ballot box and kept books on the shelves in 140 communities.

Check out EveryLibrary's full story including how they turn everyday library lovers into organizers who move real money and policy: https://bit.ly/4vIucD3

05/26/2026

Our team is hitting the ground running this June and we'd love to see you IRL!

To kick things off, Gina Davis will be at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Social Innovation Summit in Atlanta, June 2–3!

Next up, Lily Maria Percy Ruiz, Tyler Anderson, and Lyana Calyanis are headed to Netroots Nation in Philly June 4-6 and you can find them at booth #328!

Then Matt Trujillo will be attending Fundraising Day in New York June 12th with Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) New York City Chapter

Organizing, fundraising, making change happen? Come find us. We want to hear what you're working on. And stay tuned, more events coming later in the month ✨

05/21/2026

If you're running a campaign in 2026, here's a quick security-check:

✅ Do your key accounts use passkeys or hardware security keys?
✅ Is your website protected against traffic-flood attacks?
✅ Have you set up DMARC on your primary domain?

Most campaign data breaches don't start with sophisticated hacking. They start with one compromised account.

Strong authentication, a protected website, and a locked-down email domain are the three things that stop the majority of attacks before they start.

We wrote a guide with Defending Digital Campaigns breaking each one down, why they matters, and how to get set up: https://bit.ly/4nEOXMg

Worth a read before getting any further into the 2026 cycle!

Learn the three essential cybersecurity steps for political campaigns. From account authentication to AI risks, discover how to protect your campaign’s data for free.

05/19/2026

“One story that really hits home for me is about a woman who was having a birthday party for her nephew, who was turning 16. This young man is an athlete, is in student government, and is an A-B student in his school. They passed around birthday cards, and he was opening up the cards… The aunt said, ‘Read some to us.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, I don't want to do that. That's embarrassing.’ She insisted, and the young man started crying, and he said, ‘I can't read.’ That aunt has become a literacy activist as a result of that experience.” - Pete Geren, former U.S. Congressman and the 20th Secretary of the Army and founder of

This is one story that is a common experience for over 200,000 children who couldn't read at grade level in Fort Worth, Texas while 96% of their parents had no idea.

"Democracy can solve big problems but it can't solve a problem it doesn't know it has." - Geren

That insight is what sparked , a Fort Worth organization built on community trust, coalition building, and the belief that when parents know the truth, everything changes.

Partnering 80+ organizations families already trusted (YMCAs, Boys & Girls Clubs, PTAs, local nonprofits) they work to deliver that information through familiar voices, parent education, and civic organizing

Then they launched coordinated efforts:
📙 Have Your Child Read to You: 5 minutes listening to your child read. Thousands of families saw their child's real reading level for the first time.

📗 Parent-teacher support: No shame, no blame. Constructive tutoring can produce a full year of reading growth in just 3 months.

📘 Civic organizing: Residents contacted City Council. Policies changed. Funding moved.

18 months later, they surveyed parents again.

Awareness shifted from 96% to 84%, a 12-point drop in the perception gap.

That represents thousands of families who now understand where their children's literacy is at and are showing up differently.

As Geren says, "When you let parents know the truth, it changes their behavior. They support their child differently. They might get involved in political activity to try to improve the public schools."

05/14/2026

Are your donors trying to give but not following through? 😬

Turns out up to 15% of failed donations come down to simple errors (Things like typos, expired cards, forgotten info).

Not lack of effort. Just friction.

Good news is, Link by Stripe is now live in NationBuilder.

Any supporters who have used Link anywhere online already have their details saved and are ready to donate.

No re-entering info, no drop-off.

The result? Up to 7% higher conversion. Automatically.

Your supporters want to give. Now it’s easier than ever. ❤️