Ian Patrick Hines
Introducing Livingston: Built for Candidates With Strong Digital Teams
This week, we’re proud to have officially launched our first premium NationBuilder theme in the Theme Marketplace: “Livingston.”
Livingston is designed explicitly for campaigns with a large-market focus and an experienced digital team. But while it’s flexible enough for any content and powerful enough to scale with your campaign, it doesn’t require any coding knowledge to maintain. (Yes, you read that right: with Livinstgon, you can update all of your content without ever touching your pages’ code.)
We designed Livingston with communications & digital directors in mind. In this blog post, we’ll highlight some of our favorite features and how they can help your campaign achieve its goals.
Action alert bar
Livingston allows you to highlight key actions — like an important policy announcement or a call to donate — with a prominent “alert” button above the navbar.
This full-width button shows on every page and hides as the user scrolls, which makes it perfect for a noticeable but unobtrusive ask.
And the best part? Your digital team can control the text and link URL without ever touching a line of code, allowing it to be deployed or updated in seconds. (That’s a theme we’ll mention a lot because it’s crucial.)
Beautiful header photos
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we’ve created the theme to be photo-centric — helping the communications team to share the candidate’s story compellingly.
On every page, you have the option to choose a featured “header image” to compliment your content (along with an optional site-wide default). These photographs are automatically scaled and cropped to fit every screen without warping or distorting; all your team needs to do is choose a photo, upload, and save.
Flexible homepage blocks
Livingston’s modular homepage design empowers your team to update content on the fly without fear of “breaking” your site.
By design, the homepage template includes up to seven “content blocks.” Each block includes a photograph, a headline, and link to another URL on your site (or redirect URL to an external page). What’s more, these blocks are sortable by “dragging and dropping” within the NationBuilder control panel, meaning that your team has full control of what gets shown, where, and how.
To edit content, you need only to choose a photo, type a headline, and save. (Yes, it’s that easy.)
Logged-in supporter menu
Livingston allows your supporters to manage their information and quickly complete forms with automatic post-action login.
Once they’ve signed in — or submitted any forms on the site — they’ll see their name and avatar appear in the site’s top nav, along with a dropdown menu giving them access to their account settings and a link to sign out. And at the footer of every Livingston page is a link to your nation’s unsubscribe link, giving your supporters ready access to opt-out if they choose.
A clean email list is a healthy email list, and healthy email lists yield results for your campaign. By giving your supporters control of their own data, Livingston puts your team in a better position to succeed from Day One.
Summary
Livingston was designed with digital teams in mind because they’re the folks who use NationBuilder on a day-to-day basis — and when they succeed, their candidates succeed. Its features and functionality are powered natively by NationBuilder’s platform and are all available to anyone without any need for coding knowledge. We can’t wait to see what you build with them.