Terms and Definitions
Action page
A page where a visitor is invited to perform an action (e.g. participate in a survey, make a donation, etc.)
Activity
A display of supporter activities on pages. This can be activated or deactivated per page/website.
Automation
A series of email blasts and wait periods using multiple sources to enroll recipients and optional conversion goals.
Broadcasters are the voices who speak publicly on behalf of your nation. All external communications are organized around broadcasters. This form of communication is bilateral and is associated with an email address and a telephone number for incoming calls. It is not possible to use this number for outgoing calls, but it does include a mailbox for voice messages, and for incoming and outgoing text messages.
Custom domain
An exclusive and personalized URL that includes the name of your nation.
Custom fields
Custom fields support the collection of key data points not available in standard NationBuilder fields, for example, t-shirt size or graduation year.
Dashboard
The dashboard provides an overview of all of the activity in your nation.
Donation (v2) page
A page which uses NationBuilder's integrated payment processing to accept one-time or recurring donations.
Email builder
The default drag-and-drop experience for creating emails.
Email editor
The classic email editor, which uses HTML.
A third-party service integrated to NationBuilder that allows the user to publish advanced interactive media content, be it videos on YouTube, photo albums, and so on. Simply post the link in the area for content on a web page.
Featured content slider
A sliding image feature that can be activated on any page. Displays images linked to other areas of the Website (or to an external Website) that will continuously slide across the page.
Filters
Dynamic groupings of people who match certain criteria. Saved filters can adjust as people meet or fail to meet the criteria of the filter.
Groups
Collections of control panel users who are responsible for similar types of supporters or job functions within an organization.
Leaderboards
A leaderboard is a public ranking of the supporters who have taken actions towards achieving your nation’s goals.
Lists
A way to organize people that allows you to perform group actions such as registering all your contacts. This way you can extend your reach from one person to many people.
Nation
A group, organization, or individual who uses the NationBuilder platform to create, organize, and promote a cause or movement.
Parent page
Parent pages are part of page hierarchies. A parent page is a top level page, and child pages are nested under it.
Paths
A nation's goals can be broken down into paths to meet those goals. Paths can serve as a map of where a relationship currently stands. It is a step-by-step workflow to complete a chain of actions. Paths define reasons for engaging supporters and creating alignment and accountability within an organization.
Permission sets
Configurations established by the Admin that define the level of access to different functions in the control panel.
Person
Each individual you add to your People database is identified as a potential, supporter, member, volunteer, or team member.
Point person
Any person in your nation who has access to the control panel and has been assigned as the person who manages communication with an individual.
Social capital
The virtual currency supporters receive for performance or activities. It facilitates the creation of a leadership directive where you can identify the most active supporters. You can change the name of this currency in your control panel and you can also change the amount that corresponds to each action.
Priority
Priority level is a way to rank the relative importance of individuals within your people database.
Prospect
An individual in your database that does not accept serial communication from your nation. It is possible that this individual has interacted in another way or whose name was imported as communicating in the future.
Recurring donation
A consistent and repetitive donation made by an individual or group.
Relationship
The relative significance between people and organizations. You can track relationships between family members, colleagues, and organizations.
Search engine indexing
When the 'Allow search engines' function is activated, search engines can index the website to optimize what appears through their service.
Side navigation
Navigation for supporters. May include a registration form, login and action buttons, social media widgets, etc.
Slug
A slug is the unique “name” of your NationBuilder site. For example, my site is sandbox.nationbuilder.com - so “sandbox” is my slug. Slugs can also refer to the name of your unique website pages, and email/text blasts.
Snapshot
NationBuilder allows you to create a snapshot of your database at any time, especialy intended before doing something drastic, like deleting a list of people. If you accidentally delete someone or something important, this gives NationBuilder Support a chance to recover that info.
Social slider
This feature makes your pages come alive by prominently displaying an animated slider of the names and faces of everyone taking action.
Support level
Support level indicates whether a person supports an organization's mission. Support level is a 5-point scale, with 1 indicating strong support and 5 indicating strong opposition.
Supporter navigation
Navigation which only appears when a user is logged in.
Supporter portal
An interface that your supporters can log into to take actions like reviewing active recurring donations, updating payment methods, canceling recurring payments, and adjusting their amount.
Tags
A dynamic way to organize profiles of individuals into categories. Tags are virtual sticky notes added to profiles to describe a characteristic that can help you target people with what they care about most. Tags can be attached to profiles in several ways. When you click on a tag in the control panel, all profiles that share the same tag will appear.
Top navigation
The main navigation of your website. A listing of all the main pages of your site across the top of the page.
Turf cutter
An area marker that is used to narrow down lists or filters geographically on a map.
UGC
User-generated content (UGC)
Website
A visual representation of your nation that the public sees.