📌 Note: Point people can be assigned/changed at any time by any CPU with permissions to manage them.

A Point person is the person who is primarily responsible for the overall relationship with a person or organization in your database. Having a single person who bears responsibility for a person or organization helps to build a relationship with them over time, enriching their connection to your nation.

Before we get into how it works and why it’s effective, consider its symbolic value: As an organization, you’re sharing responsibility for your most valuable asset, which is relationships with your supporters. Distributing this responsibility is the first step in recognizing your staff as leaders in their own right.

Every signup record in NationBuilder can be assigned a Point person, either automatically or manually. This relationship enables the Point person to know when their assigned folks take action. For instance: If I’m responsible for 100 supporters, whenever any of them take action — from donating to signing a petition to answering a survey to calling the office — NationBuilder notifies me and prompts me to follow up. This kind of 1-on-1 interaction creates human relationships, building loyalty and retention among supporters.

As an example, if I’m the point person for Sally Giraffe, when Sally calls my organization's phone number, NationBuilder sends me an email notification, notifying me of the call and voicemail if one is left.

If you’re new to NationBuilder, or just new to using Point people, the first thing to do is make sure everyone in your organization has at least basic access to your nation. Everyone from the Executive Director and board members down to entry-level admin staffers should be a control panel user — you can use custom permission sets to give appropriate access based on their role.

Once a staffer is a control panel user, you can start assigning supporters to them. Some organizations do this geographically, so everyone in a particular state or region is assigned to that region’s designated leader. If the regional model makes sense for you, here’s how you would carve out access.

1. Use filters to segment your supporter list by region. For example, here’s everyone in my nation who lives in California. Note that I’m filtering out my major donors because I want to assign all top donors to my Development Director, regardless of geography.

2. Once you filter for the right group of people, add them to a list, and use the batch update function to update the Point Person to the correct person.

3. Point people can and should customize their email notifications to their preferences. By default, your Point people will be notified when their assigned supporters do just about anything, which can overwhelm the inbox so you'll want to get ahead of that. Control panel users, Point person or not can sign up for email notifications whenever anyone takes action. A Development Director, for example, might want to get notified for all donations, not just for those by people to whom they are assigned. Read more about updating email notification settings.

New and future supporters can be automatically assigned a Point person using any NationBuilder action page. Action takers who already have a Point person will not be affected . For example, a new supporter who donates can be automatically assigned to a Development staffer. Below, you can see in the settings of this Donate page that it is set to assign all new people who donate on this page to Tia Anderson:

Most, if not all, of your most active Point people should also be assigned a Broadcaster. A Broadcaster is the main way of communicating with your supporters via NationBuilder and can be found in the Communications section.

Broadcasters can send emails including 1:1 emails, email blasts, and autoresponses to page actions along with SMS messages if included in your plan. Every page on your website, by default, will send an autoresponse email from your nation’s primary broadcaster, using pre-populated generic text. You should always customize the content of your autoresponses before using the page, so you can be sure it’s set to come from the correct person and have the correct message. For example, your Donate page might trigger an auto-response from your Development Director, whereas a Petition page may trigger a response from your Advocacy Director.

As your Point people engage their supporters, you can use NationBuilder’s virtual currency, Social capital, to measure each Point person’s level of engagement. With Social capital, supporters earn points with every action. You can assign more points for your most valuable actions like donations so they are worth more than other actions, such as website comments. Actions that can trigger Social capital are 1:1 interactions, like phone calls, emails, and logged contacts from in-person interactions. Each time a Point person emails, calls, or otherwise engages 1:1 with one of their supporters, they earn social capital. You can celebrate that Point person engagement with a custom Leaderboard, which can be set to display only staffers, like this one called “Top Staffers” pinned to the Dashboard in my nation:

Point people will also see their impact on your organization’s collective goals when they log in. Your Goals dashboard will automatically show the top contributor to your goals, and then the contribution of the person who is currently logged in. For example, my organization had a goal to get 200 new donors in 2024. When I log in, I see that collectively, we’ve met 22% of this goal, and Cam Batschke has done most of the work to get us there:

Now that you have active Point people... Get more!

Think about your Point People as your organization's leaders. Now, think about what it would be like to have more of them. What if you could double the number of people doing the work of your best Point people? And then, what if you could then double that number? Think of granting someone control panel access to your nation as the ultimate expression of trust in your top supporters. This orientation also lends clarity to your organization's ladder of engagement. Instead of thinking of donating as the culmination of your supporter's relationship journey, for example, make assigning a Point person the next step, delegating responsibility to a trusted member of your organization.