Campaign Trail to Corporate Tool Box

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Campaign Trail to Corporate Tool Box
From left to right: Endres

NationBuilder is known for its political and nonprofit organizing software, which helped usher into power over the past 14 months both U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron.

But the downtown-based company’s clients include more than just presidents, other politicians and various organizations that underpin their campaigns. The firm, which offers a software suite designed to help engage constituents and customers, counts a growing number of private-sector enterprises that are using its program as a marketing tool.

Privately held NationBuilder claims 50 percent of its 2017 revenue came from corporate customers. It launched a business-focused version of its software in 2013.

The continued push into the for-profit realm follows a decade-long shift in how enterprises in the private sector market to their potential customers. The change is driven largely by social media interactions between corporations and customers, but is rooted in the online organizing tactics of Barack Obama’s 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, said Lea Endres, chief executive and co-founder of NationBuilder.

“Being effective either as a business, or a campaign, or nonprofit, is different in this era,” she said. “People do things based on peer-to-peer (recommendations), not on your traditional advertising strategy. People in this era need to understand the basic tenants of organizing.”

That means corporations now need a sophisticated understanding of their most avid customers – how they communicate with each other, how to reach them, and how to create incentives for them to promote the brand, Endres said.

“You don’t have to stifle the creativity and beauty of a network,” she said. “But you can … exert some amount of control and coordination.”

NationBuilder offers businesses help on efficiently reaching small pockets of their passionate customers and turning those fans into repeat buyers and unpaid brand ambassadors – clients who willingly tell their friends and social networks about how much they love a company and its products.

NationBuilder, which has 121 employees, declined to disclose its revenue or how many customers it services overall, but executives did identify a wide-ranging list of clients who use NationBuilder software, such as clothing retailer AllSaints of London, Gelateria Uli of downtown Los Angeles, Eastman Strings of Pomona, and coffee shop Overflow Coffee Bar of Chicago.

“You have everyone from the local gelateria, who is trying to track customers and create incentive programs, (using NationBuilder),” Endres said, “All the way up to really large corporations.”

Activist origins

NationBuilder was co-founded in 2009 by its Executive Chairman Jim Gilliam, Endres and Vice President of Design Jesse Haff. The company was initially intended to offer an easier way to organize political and social movements online and was led by Gilliam as chief executive until he stepped down in October due to personal health matters. The company’s software platform is an all-in-one customer relationship manager, website builder, emailing marketing, payment and social media engagement program for political organizing – effectively combining a number of services that are often provided piecemeal to clients by several vendors.

NationBuilder’s software is best-known for serving as a Republican campaign tool, but is used by clients on both sides of the political aisle.

The firm insists on nonpartisanship for itself, according to Endres.

“I disagree with most of our customers in some respects,” she said.

NationBuilder has raised $14.8 million since its founding from high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, and early Facebook Inc. investor Sean Parker.

Basics

NationBuilder is a customer relationship manager or, CRM, at its core – a glorified Rolodex that helps organizations track contacts and conversations with individuals. In addition to the basic features of a CRM, it offers a pre-integrated suite of software to replace programs such as website builder WordPress, email marketing program MailChimp, payment transfer portal PayPal, and social media engagement tool Hootsuite.

The CRM market is already crowded and highly competitive, with giants such as Salesforce.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. fighting for position.

NationBuilder seeks to stand out by pitching its ability to track company-customer conversations across many channels such as websites, social media, emails, phone calls and events.

Jon Ferrara, chief executive of CRM developer Nimble in Santa Monica, said many well-established CRMs don’t do a good job of holistically tracking and responding to customer interactions. NationBuilder could be onto something it can create an effective platform to handle those tasks, Ferrara said.

“Future CRM systems won’t just be a CRM, they’ll blend marketing … and they’ll blend social,” he said. “In order to break through the clutter of our over-communicated, over-connected world you need to be able to reach out in an authentic one-to-one way.”

Learning NationBuilder’s many different features is still difficult, said Jason Foster, operations manager of River LA, a nonprofit that promotes revitalization of the Los Angeles River and uses NationBuilder.

“It was challenging to learn as much as I needed to learn to be good at it,” he said, adding that other CRMs are difficult to master, too. “It’s very tech heavy and software heavy – not everyone can understand those things.”

River LA has used the software to group together users on Facebook who are particularly interested in information about the Los Angeles River, reaching out to them when there are relevant events taking place in their area.

“If you are on the River LA page and like a post about water quality or transportation, if you are on our email list, we are able to keep you engaged with content about that topic,” Foster said, adding the result is a supporter base that can be leveraged to show up at events or advocate for certain causes.

That’s a lesson that businesses are increasingly aware of, Endres said.

“If your goal is to improve your bottom line and… there are people in your base who are purchasing your clothing every other week, opening your emails, and tweeting about you and reading your tweets, and you don’t know who they are that is a huge missed opportunity for you,” she said.

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