IN LATE January, Donald Trump held one of his final rallies before the Iowa caucuses at the Dubuque airport. On the tarmac, with loudspeakers blasting the theme from the movie Air Force One, a crowd of shivering supporters roared when Trump’s Boeing757 made a flyby.
Many of the estimated 400 people in attendance had been notified about the event through NationBuilder, a digital hub for campaigns that handles the website design, fundraising, organising of volunteers and social media.
As Trump has moved from outsider candidate to Republican frontrunner, his campaign has been collecting e-mail addresses, cellphone numbers and other information from supporters and feeding the data into the NationBuilder system to automate the voter-outreach process.
The software lets campaign staffers target individuals about issues in which they’ve expressed an interest and notify them of events occurring near their homes. It can also track social media so a campaign can see who’s liking or sharing a post. NationBuilder’s technology is not as sophisticated as a custom-built platform, but candidates who subscribe to the service can immediately start tracking voters and organising volunteers, for far less money.
In the world of retail politics, the company has become a great democratiser since its founding in 2009. It’s given a political novice such as Trump access to the type of sophisticated tools that US President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had to build in 2012.
"This is what Obama figured out, but it took $1bn and a whole host of engineers to do," says Emily Schwartz, NationBuilder’s head of organising.
"Now it’s commercialised and readily available and can scale to different sizes of campaigns. You don’t have to be a fundraising machine."
NationBuilder, citing nondisclosure agreements, declined to discuss the services it provides to Trump. The campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It is the creation of Jim Gilliam, who worked at Lycos, the search engine, before becoming an antiwar activist in the early 2000s.
"He’s always been what people characterise as a hero engineer," says Patrick Michael Kane, a former chief technology officer of MoveOn.org who now runs We Also Walk Dogs, a software company that makes the organising software ActionKit.
"He can sit down and in 10 hours, bang out an application that would take another engineer 100hours to write."
...
NATIONBUILDER’S prices start at $29 a month for e-mail blasting and social media-tracking. Versions of the software that sync credit databases and consumer data — voters’ incomes, what magazines or newspapers they subscribe to, what cars they drive — with a campaign’s own voter lists run $5,000 a month and higher.
Before he came along, Gilliam says, "It was at least $10,000 to get started for what we’re offering for $29 per month." Its biggest client spends $500,000 a year.
Gilliam expected most of his customers to be state and local candidates or petition-drive organisers — such as the animal-rights advocates pushing to end carriage horses in New York’s Central Park, one of NationBuilder’s 7,000 active campaigns.
"The people who are in power, frankly, don’t need NationBuilder. They can afford engineers to hack things together," he says.
But NationBuilder’s easy-to-use platform has also turned out to be attractive to candidates with plenty of money.
Last year, Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign was one of the company’s largest customers among federal candidates, according to campaign spending records pulled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. Rick Santorum signed up, and so did Trump.
Absent from NationBuilder’s list of customers are many Democrats. The party’s candidates rely on a company called NGP VAN, which has formal ties to the Democratic National Committee.
Gilliam spent part of his childhood in San Jose, where his father was a software engineer for IBM. His parents were Christian fundamentalists and members of a local megachurch affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.
By age 12, Gilliam was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and attending church three days a week.
His computer obsession started early. When his father brought home an early IBM PC with a modem, Gilliam discovered a new world. In a 2011 speech, he said, "Growing up, I had two loves: Jesus and the internet."
He attended Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and designed its first website.
"I even fixed Dr Falwell’s computer once," he says.
Then doctors discovered Gilliam had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Two weeks into his chemotherapy treatment, his mother was also diagnosed with cancer.
When he lived and she didn’t, Gilliam dropped out of Liberty to work for a start-up in Boston. About six months later, he was diagnosed with leukaemia; he underwent a successful bone marrow transplant.
Gilliam went to work for Lycos in 1998. Two years later, he was hired by Business.com, a search company. Gilliam rewrote the company’s main search code in 17days and was named chief technology officer.
But after the September11 attacks, his passions shifted.
He was enraged by the George W Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and decided to make a career change after hearing that Robert Greenwald, a documentarian, needed a researcher for a film about the war.
...
GILLIAM sent Greenwald an e-mail and was hired. He immediately demonstrated his skills at internet organising, creating tools to let people schedule screenings at their homes and raise money for projects.
In 2005, when Greenwald released an independent film about Walmart Stores’ labour practices, the retailer hired a crisis-management firm to respond.
"It was really intoxicating," Gilliam says. "We were a ragtag group of filmmakers and did this on virtually no budget."
Soon after, he began feeling short of breath. His earlier treatments had scarred his lungs, and he required a double-lung replacement.
Surgeons at the University of California at Los Angeles decided the procedure was too risky. His friends and family organised an online campaign to change the doctors’ minds; it worked. A donor was found, and the procedure was successful. Gilliam was 29.
In late 2008, as Obama’s campaign was demonstrating what technology could do for politics, Gilliam started writing the code for what became NationBuilder.
In 2010, one of his friends, Reshma Saujani, ran for Congress in New York, and Gilliam made her a database at no cost. A fundraising tool he built simplified the way people could contribute money online; one feature allowed supporters to organise events, and another made it easier for campaigns to communicate with volunteers.
"I agreed to be his guinea pig," says Saujani, who lost the race.
Gilliam came away convinced he had a viable business. Others agreed: NationBuilder has raised about $35m from the likes of Sean Parker, an early backer of Facebook, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Gilliam has attempted to broaden his company’s reach outside electoral politics, with varying success.
Last year, it laid off about a quarter of the staff who’d been hired to strike deals with small businesses, musicians, and others in the private sector.
"It didn’t work trying to push it faster than it wanted to work," Gilliam says. Despite the setbacks, he says, the company recently became profitable.
Several corporations are using NationBuilder, including Airbnb, which has tapped it to mobilise customers to fight regulations.
Politicians and groups in Africa, Australia, and Europe have signed up. Britain’s Labour Party uses NationBuilder, and Canada’s leading parties have adopted the technology.
Gilliam’s friends question why he works with candidates and organisations whose political beliefs he almost certainly abhors.
That line of criticism makes Gilliam angry. As he frequently points out, the right to organise is fundamental to democracy.
"Donald Trump is not the first person to use NationBuilder that I disagree with," he says. "I probably disagree with most of our customers. That’s what democracy is about."
Bloomberg
NationBuilder creator and ‘hero engineer’ Jim Gilliam has built a software platform that is attracting electoral campaigners and corporations. Politicians and groups in Africa have also signed up. Picture: SUPPLIED
IN LATE January, Donald Trump held one of his final rallies before the Iowa caucuses at the Dubuque airport. On the tarmac, with loudspeakers blasting the theme from the movie Air Force One, a crowd of shivering supporters roared when Trump’s Boeing757 made a flyby.
Many of the estimated 400 people in attendance had been notified about the event through NationBuilder, a digital hub for campaigns that handles the website design, fundraising, organising of volunteers and social media.
As Trump has moved from outsider candidate to Republican frontrunner, his campaign has been collecting e-mail addresses, cellphone numbers and other information from supporters and feeding the data into the NationBuilder system to automate the voter-outreach process.
The software lets campaign staffers target individuals about issues in which they’ve expressed an interest and notify them of events occurring near their homes. It can also track social media so a campaign can see who’s liking or sharing a post. NationBuilder’s technology is not as sophisticated as a custom-built platform, but candidates who subscribe to the service can immediately start tracking voters and organising volunteers, for far less money.
In the world of retail politics, the company has become a great democratiser since its founding in 2009. It’s given a political novice such as Trump access to the type of sophisticated tools that US President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had to build in 2012.
"This is what Obama figured out, but it took $1bn and a whole host of engineers to do," says Emily Schwartz, NationBuilder’s head of organising.
"Now it’s commercialised and readily available and can scale to different sizes of campaigns. You don’t have to be a fundraising machine."
NationBuilder, citing nondisclosure agreements, declined to discuss the services it provides to Trump. The campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It is the creation of Jim Gilliam, who worked at Lycos, the search engine, before becoming an antiwar activist in the early 2000s.
"He’s always been what people characterise as a hero engineer," says Patrick Michael Kane, a former chief technology officer of MoveOn.org who now runs We Also Walk Dogs, a software company that makes the organising software ActionKit.
"He can sit down and in 10 hours, bang out an application that would take another engineer 100hours to write."
...
NATIONBUILDER’S prices start at $29 a month for e-mail blasting and social media-tracking. Versions of the software that sync credit databases and consumer data — voters’ incomes, what magazines or newspapers they subscribe to, what cars they drive — with a campaign’s own voter lists run $5,000 a month and higher.
Before he came along, Gilliam says, "It was at least $10,000 to get started for what we’re offering for $29 per month." Its biggest client spends $500,000 a year.
Gilliam expected most of his customers to be state and local candidates or petition-drive organisers — such as the animal-rights advocates pushing to end carriage horses in New York’s Central Park, one of NationBuilder’s 7,000 active campaigns.
"The people who are in power, frankly, don’t need NationBuilder. They can afford engineers to hack things together," he says.
But NationBuilder’s easy-to-use platform has also turned out to be attractive to candidates with plenty of money.
Last year, Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign was one of the company’s largest customers among federal candidates, according to campaign spending records pulled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. Rick Santorum signed up, and so did Trump.
Absent from NationBuilder’s list of customers are many Democrats. The party’s candidates rely on a company called NGP VAN, which has formal ties to the Democratic National Committee.
Gilliam spent part of his childhood in San Jose, where his father was a software engineer for IBM. His parents were Christian fundamentalists and members of a local megachurch affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority.
By age 12, Gilliam was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and attending church three days a week.
His computer obsession started early. When his father brought home an early IBM PC with a modem, Gilliam discovered a new world. In a 2011 speech, he said, "Growing up, I had two loves: Jesus and the internet."
He attended Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and designed its first website.
"I even fixed Dr Falwell’s computer once," he says.
Then doctors discovered Gilliam had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Two weeks into his chemotherapy treatment, his mother was also diagnosed with cancer.
When he lived and she didn’t, Gilliam dropped out of Liberty to work for a start-up in Boston. About six months later, he was diagnosed with leukaemia; he underwent a successful bone marrow transplant.
Gilliam went to work for Lycos in 1998. Two years later, he was hired by Business.com, a search company. Gilliam rewrote the company’s main search code in 17days and was named chief technology officer.
But after the September11 attacks, his passions shifted.
He was enraged by the George W Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and decided to make a career change after hearing that Robert Greenwald, a documentarian, needed a researcher for a film about the war.
...
GILLIAM sent Greenwald an e-mail and was hired. He immediately demonstrated his skills at internet organising, creating tools to let people schedule screenings at their homes and raise money for projects.
In 2005, when Greenwald released an independent film about Walmart Stores’ labour practices, the retailer hired a crisis-management firm to respond.
"It was really intoxicating," Gilliam says. "We were a ragtag group of filmmakers and did this on virtually no budget."
Soon after, he began feeling short of breath. His earlier treatments had scarred his lungs, and he required a double-lung replacement.
Surgeons at the University of California at Los Angeles decided the procedure was too risky. His friends and family organised an online campaign to change the doctors’ minds; it worked. A donor was found, and the procedure was successful. Gilliam was 29.
In late 2008, as Obama’s campaign was demonstrating what technology could do for politics, Gilliam started writing the code for what became NationBuilder.
In 2010, one of his friends, Reshma Saujani, ran for Congress in New York, and Gilliam made her a database at no cost. A fundraising tool he built simplified the way people could contribute money online; one feature allowed supporters to organise events, and another made it easier for campaigns to communicate with volunteers.
"I agreed to be his guinea pig," says Saujani, who lost the race.
Gilliam came away convinced he had a viable business. Others agreed: NationBuilder has raised about $35m from the likes of Sean Parker, an early backer of Facebook, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Gilliam has attempted to broaden his company’s reach outside electoral politics, with varying success.
Last year, it laid off about a quarter of the staff who’d been hired to strike deals with small businesses, musicians, and others in the private sector.
"It didn’t work trying to push it faster than it wanted to work," Gilliam says. Despite the setbacks, he says, the company recently became profitable.
Several corporations are using NationBuilder, including Airbnb, which has tapped it to mobilise customers to fight regulations.
Politicians and groups in Africa, Australia, and Europe have signed up. Britain’s Labour Party uses NationBuilder, and Canada’s leading parties have adopted the technology.
Gilliam’s friends question why he works with candidates and organisations whose political beliefs he almost certainly abhors.
That line of criticism makes Gilliam angry. As he frequently points out, the right to organise is fundamental to democracy.
"Donald Trump is not the first person to use NationBuilder that I disagree with," he says. "I probably disagree with most of our customers. That’s what democracy is about."
Bloomberg
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