GUEST BIO:

[Annie Mosbacher](https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniemosbacher/) is the Vice President of Customer Engagement at [NationBuilder](https://nationbuilder.com/), a software for political candidates, non-profit organizations and brands. Their customers are individuals who are working with organizations, building a community, or advocating for a cause. Annie’s day to day involves the long term health and retention of their customer base.

Annie’s passion for non-profit organizations and the power political candidates have to make change led her to work with and found her own non-profit organization prior to NationBuilder. Her first endeavor was in helping underserved communities. This inspired her to co-found a non-profit connecting high school students with career paths they weren’t aware of. Her mission was to fill the large gap between the fields students were blindly pursuing and careers the workforce actually needed.

Annie continues to pursue change, regardless of it benefiting her own political beliefs, through her VP position at NationBuilder.

SHOW SUMMARY:

Today’s guest is Annie Mosbacher, the Vice President of Customer Engagement at NationBuilder. NationBuilder is a SaaS company offering non-profits, political candidates and brands help in building their communities. Annie oversees their client acquisition and retention, which is an incredibly interesting position as her political consumers don’t necessarily need the product, a campaign builder, after election day.

In this episode, Annie explains how NationBuilder acquires customers and retains them after they’ve finished using the product. She walks us through their non-partisan view and explains why it continues to be a fundamental part of their business, despite backlash. Lastly, she explains the future of digital political and fundraising campaigns and how any business can learn from these industries to grow their own dedicated community.

This is the Lean Commerce Podcast.

TOPICS:

How did you initially start working with non-profits and political campaigns?

1:44 I have a deep and profound connection with higher education. I served as an executive director at the beginning of my career, helping underserved communities. Afterwards, I co-founded a startup to help young high school students connect with future careers they may not have been aware of. There’s a large gap in what people are pursuing and what the workforce actually needs, and I wanted to close it.

What careers did you find students most often followed?

4:46 Students often followed a liberal arts degree or went to college and used it to initially explore their future career. Yet, plumbing, welding, and more technical fields had the most opportunities. Students weren’t choosing these careers because they weren’t aware of the option. We explained to them that in three years, they would make six figures in these fields and if they were interested we showed them how to follow through.

What does customer acquisition look like when your customers are political candidates?

10:05 We have always provided a free voter file to people interested in running for office but don’t have the experience or connections to show them how to build a campaign. Our campaign courses are certainly there to drive customer acquisition, but they are also designed to help candidates build their first campaign.

How do you advance your mission and financially keep NationBuilder afloat?

13:44 It’s multifaceted, but the grounding principle is that we are extremely non-partisan. We’ll work with any customer regardless of their political beliefs or backgrounds, which is unprecedented in the tech and software political space. We also have a lot of diversification in the scale of customers we support, ranging from large international campaigns to local school board candidates.

15:24 We offer different engagement paths, so whether a customer wins or loses their campaign, there are ways for them to c