Zapier + NationBuilder Productivity Hacks

Zapier is a online service that allows you to build interactions (aka Zaps) between websites and tools. Common examples are things like adding emails from a specific folder as tasks on your to-do list, or saving Tweets that you’ve liked into a Google Sheet. Here are a few of my favourite NationBuilder related Zaps.

Get Notified of NationBuilder Product Updates

Using an RSS feed of NationBuilder’s Issues & Suggestions forum, you can post product updates and bugs directly to Slack.

Make a Zap using the RSS trigger, with  http://nationbuilder.com/suggest.rss as the feed. Now you can push the updates from that feed into any service you’d like, including Slack.

Bonus tip: Try this same Zap using this link instead of the Nationbuilder Suggestions link: http://www.cstreet.ca/tactics.rss

Input Donation Records into Quickbooks Online

One of the more powerful Zapier tools is their Email Parser, which you can send an email to and Zapier will parse selected data out of it, allowing you to input that data into other Zapier integrations. With a Zapier paid membership you can integrate with Quickbooks Online, and save yourself a whole lot of admin work. There are a few steps to this one, but it’s worth it!

1. In your Nation’s donation page settings, enable Autoreponses.
2. In your Autoresponse’s broadcaster settings, enable the “bcc me on all outgoing emails” option.
3. Go to https://parser.zapier.com/ and setup a new Parser inbox.
4. In your email account (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) settings, create a rule that forwards the autoresponse emails to the new Zapier Parser inbox address.

Now you can highlight the data you’d like parsed, and use it in Zaps with Quickbooks, Google Sheets, or any of Zapier’s integrated services.

Bonus tip: if you’re familiar with webhooks and JSON, you can use NationBuilder’s Webhooks features to send new donation data to Zapier in JSON format.

Know when NationBuilder is Down

NationBuilder is a wonderful platform, but like any website, it goes down sometimes. When you’re running a campaign or managing multiple clients, knowing about an outage as soon as it happens can help your team respond quickly.

Using NationBuilder’s Status page and Zapier, you can send notifications to a group email, post a message in Slack, or even create a calendar event to help you keep track of past outages.

Head over to http://status.nationbuilder.com/ and click the Subscribe to Updates button, then select RSS. Now with Zapier’s RSS trigger you can feed those notifications into any number of services.

I’d love to hear about your favourite Zaps and NationBuilder productivity hacks. Post in the comments and let me know!