Guest Post: Ecanvasser + NationBuilder: The Value of Tech-Stacks

There is a host of great digital tools that have sprung up in recent years to serve political campaigns and advocacy groups. NationBuilder is possibly the best known non-partisan product that captures a lot of the workflows required in building grassroots campaigns and communicating to broad groups of people. One of the most impressive things about NationBuilder was their understanding, from early on, that they needed to be a part of an ecosystem of providers in order to really serve their customers. This collaborative philosophy has led to powerful integrations with a variety of third-party softwares such as Ecanvasser, CallHub, and Hustle. This collaborative philosophy also extends to their Architects and Experts network and draws the skill sets of those individuals to enhance the product as a whole. 

Ecanvasser is far from a simple app plugin for NationBuilder. In its own right, it boasts a full CRM system, email blaster, survey builder, and analytics tools. This, in conjunction with a mobile field app, provides robust functionality for campaigns that require face-to-face interaction. The benefits of adopting mobile apps are clear to most campaigners nowadays and can be seen in paperless campaigns, huge administrative cost savings, and better quality data. In the context of NationBuilder users, the idea that you might outlay so much on digital organizing and then do field canvassing with pen and paper seems ridiculous. For field operatives particularly, having walk-lists delivered to your phone and having all of the data you capture being synced automatically to HQ is a great experience.

The scenario for many NationBuilder users, whether they are large political organizations or unions, is that they have many campaigns running concurrently, whether that is on a geographic basis or simply around separate issues. The value of an Ecanvasser/NationBuilder tech stack is that Ecanvasser can be spun out to these individual campaigns and used to capture information as well as doing a lot of the campaign work. For constituencies then, staffers have access to all the power of the technology without the complication of having to separate their data from the wider organization’s data. At the same time, HQ gets all the valuable data back from its constituencies to augment its party database. It is exactly the same for the likes of unions who might be running membership drives, advocacy campaigns, or working to support individual political parties in an election race. 

All in all, a little planning and consideration around how best to use tech stacks can result in huge savings for organizations and increase the chances of success with campaigns.

If you would like to learn more, visit the Ecanvasser website. 

*This is a guest post by Ecanvasser's Brendan Tobin