Important to any organization is how you manage your people, and integral to this process are NationBuilder workflows. This refers to the general process that’s undertaken when a user interacts with the site: what acknowledgement is given, who gets notified, who’s assigned responsibility, and so forth.

Workflows in NationBuilder involve a number of key features:

• Autoresponses
• Contact Types
• Followers
• Point People
• Follow-ups

Workflows are important to any part of your site where a user can interact. For instance, through signing up to receive an application package, through sending you a feedback message, etc.

To help illustrate workflows, I’ll go through the process of what a workflow might look like for when someone submits feedback on the “Contact” page.

To begin, an autoresponse should be set up so that a user receives acknowledgement for having performed an action (i.e., contacting you) on the site.

Next, since feedback from members and supporters is extremely important and we’ll want to know when it happens, ‘followers’ should be set up on the page so that these people receive an email notification any time the action takes place

• On any page, click the Followers tab. Start typing in the name of the person you want to receive the email notifications and click “Add”
• You can add as many followers as you like, but a person must exist in your Nation already to be able to be a page follower. If they don’t exist, you’ll have to add them.

Questions and member comments also might be the domain of a specific admin/outreach person in our organization, so we’ll want to assign any users who submit feedback to a specific staff person in our Nation. This person is called a “Point Person”

• To set up a point person on the Contact page, go to Feedback settings (for pretty much any action, the page where you’ll set Point People will be: [action-type] settings)
• From the “Assign people who leave feedback to a point person” dropdown, choose the person in your Nation that you want to have responsibility for this particular action
• Only one person can be assigned as a Point Person for a page action, and that person must have special permissions in your Nation (i.e., they must be an Admin, Staffer, or have some other special access)

Because most feedback submitted on the “Contact” page likely warrants a reply, we’ll want to mark any feedback submitted as requiring a “follow-up” so that the Point Person knows they have to deal with it.

• To set the feedback action as requiring a follow-up, check the “Mark people who leave feedback as needing follow-up” box
• This will make boxes appear for “Follow-up type” and “Set follow-up due date”
  • Follow-up type refers to how we want to categorize the communication that would occur here. NationBuilder sets some default Contact Types, but you can also customize your own by going to your overall Nation’s Settings (on the very top right of the entire page) and then to Defaults → Contact types
  • Set follow-up due date is the amount of time we want to give before our Point Person either has to respond to this person or dismiss/end the follow-up as not being important
• Because user feedback is crucial, we are going to set the Contact Type as “General Inquiries” and set the due date for “same day”

Having done all of this, as a Point Person I can now log into the Nation and click Dashboard → Followup, and instantly see all of my assigned follow-ups due both that day and the overdue ones. From there I can get to work addressing the most pertinent user interactions in the Nation.

This sample process was done for a sample Contact/feedback scenario, but it will be similar no matter the action.

Keep in mind that certain actions might not warrant certain steps – for example, if the action page was a petition page that I was putting out to a huge list, I probably wouldn’t want to assign a follower that might get hundreds of emails daily about every signature, nor would I need to assign followups (since signing a petition isn’t typically an action that warrants individualized reachout).

However, the thought process outlined in the above example should help inform workflows that make sense for your specific situation.