Who is SupporterBase for?

Every so often we get asked something along the lines of: “what kind of organisation could benefit from SupporterBase”?

It’s a fair question. SupporterBase draws on advanced campaigning principles of volunteer empowerment and distributed organising. These can be powerful elements of a successful organising strategy, but they are not necessarily for everyone.

That’s why we have come up with this quick list of common characteristics of a SupporterBase user.

This list is by no means prescriptive! We have already seen how creative campaigners can take advantage of SupporterBase’s flexibility to propose new use cases :) Also, not all characteristics will necessarily apply to every user. Sharing any one of these characteristics, or a combination of them, could make SupporterBase a good fit for you.

Nonetheless, we hope this short list can serve as a bit of a useful reference guide when thinking about whether SupporterBase might be right for your organisation or campaign.

What does a “typical” SupporterBase customer look like?

1. They have have a presence spread out geographically across a city, state or country, where those clusters of supporters can be empowered to run in a self-organised and semi-autonomous (or fully-autonomous) manner in their relevant jurisdiction.
2. They seek to empower their supporters to organise their own events in a structured manner (e.g. where supporters form groups in line with specific interests, causes, policy areas or the types of events they run and attend).
3. They have an active community of volunteers who are not staff of the organisation (and therefore don’t have access to the organisation’s central data and systems) but who nonetheless run activities, events and outreach to other organisation members.
4. They seek to employ distributed organising to grow their community organically, where the more passionate supporters are able to recruit others for the cause, engage with them directly, and have an easy way to automatically feed the data from those engagements back into the organisation’s central nation.
5. They may like the idea of NationBuilder Network but:
   1. do not want to give each branch or chapter the full power provided by a subnation, or;
   2. do not want to train volunteers in the full suite of NationBuilder tools;
   3. or their chapters only need a limited set of features (e.g. they only need a space on the main website rather than their own site, and they primarily need to contact members, recruit new supporters, send email & SMS blasts, run events, etc.)

If you’re still unsure about whether SupporterBase is the right tool for your organising strategy, get in touch! We want our work to be genuinely useful to progressive campaigners, so we won’t try to “sell” you on SupporterBase if we think your particular circumstances mean you will be better served by another approach :)