Brand Response

As those who already use NationBuilder know, having your people database and website content all in one system can be really powerful. For savvy content marketing folk it means using the information you already have on members, donors and customers to display targeted, smarter messaging to different groups. But there are also many smaller day-to-day benefits with this approach that can make content management tasks just that little bit more elegant.

Directory pages are a simple idea. You’ve got a list of supporters, members or customers in your people database that need to be displayed on your website. This could be for a myriad of reasons; rewarding the work of super volunteers, displaying a contact list of staffers, recognising a specific type of donor etc, etc. Before NationBuilder this would have been a real hassle to keep updated - you’d either need to do it manually or create a complicated (and costly) CRM integration for what should be an easy task.

Whilst building a new custom NationBuilder theme for Citizens UK, a community organising group in the United Kingdom, we needed an easy way for their staff to display multiple and distributed lists of local organiser contact details in different areas. Enter directory pages.

We designed a custom page template for local groups and then added some clever liquid code to pull in tagged lists of users from a directory page. Using this method all the national team need do is add or remove the tags “Local Group Contact” and “Local Group XYZ Page Slug” to people who should appear as contacts on these different pages. Sometimes the small details really do count.