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"NationBuilder, a service that provides state-of-the-art digital organizing technology to almost any political campaign, has made what the company's president called \"probably the largest deal ever struck in political technology\" in terms of the number of elections it can potentially impact.\nThe deal? NationBuilder will be the exclusive campaign technology of the Republican State Leadership Committee, whose mission is to elect Republican candidates running for office at the state level across the U.S.\nThrough the arrangement, Republican candidates running for about 7500 different offices will get greatly discounted access to the service. NationBuilder will provide those candidates with websites, digital organizing tools and training, access to voter data and a mechanism to share data between Republican campaigns. \nRepublicans won't be required to use NationBuilder for their digital organizing needs, but the RLSC will advertise it to GOP candidates and encourage them to sign up.\nJoe Green, president and co-founder of NationBuilder, told Mashable that the arrangement is a sign of his platform's meteoric success.\n\"We're a company that's been in beta for a little more than a year, and now we're the technology of the bulk of the nationwide Republican races,\" Green said. \nGreen also stressed that NationBuilder is non-partisan and willing to work with any campaign. For example, Cory Booker \u2014 the very popular Democratic Mayor of Newark, N.J. \u2014 is among NationBuilder's customers.\n\"Everyone else has built partisan technology while we're building non-partisan technology,\" Green said. \"I think people are tired of technology wielded as a partisan weapon. Our fundamental belief is that everyone should have access. This is the technology of democracy, everyone should have equal access. It's not up to us to decide who wins, that's up to the voters.\"\n\nSEE ALSO: NationBuilder Lets Any Campaign \u2013 Yes, Even Yours \u2013 Build a Following\nFor Green, NationBuilder is all about taking the digital tools that have thus far been reserved for well-funded presidential campaigns and giving them to lower-level local politicians, who he believes can really benefit from the tools.\n\"We think that when all is said and done, it's not going to be about the presidential candidates, it'll be about local elections,\" said Green. \"Only in the national election will each candidate will spend over $1 billion, others will pay an order of magnitue less. People are being barraged about presidential news every day, but as you go down the ballot, people's awareness about candidates dips into low single-digit percentages. When nobody has any idea who's running, the ability to directly reach out to candidates is so powerful.\"\nHow can digital organizing shake up local politics? Share your thoughts in the comments below.\nThumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, pagadesign"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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