Speaking of the outback, it was a pleasure as always to work with Partnership for the Outback, this time on their new website. The Partnership for the Outback brings together an alliance of leading conservation organisations working for nature, people and the future of outback Western Australia, including by advocating for incentives for diverse and sustainable land uses in the outback, investing in national parks, working with Indigenous Rangers, restoring productivity and supporting carbon farming.

The Guardian Australia, supported by our partners at the Pew Charitable Trusts, are running a great series examining the land, the animals and plants and the people that call Australia’s outback home. If you enjoy your current affairs in the form of some quality storytelling, give it a look.

Our friends at Environment Victoria and their campaign partners had a massive win a few weeks back, stopping Australia's biggest corporate polluter AGL from building a giant gas import terminal in the heart of Westernport Bay, a beautiful part of the state and home to more than 1,300 unique marine species and migratory birds. The result was a testament to the power of grassroots community organising, and we’re thrilled to be able to continue supporting Environment Victoria’s efforts in this regard via SupporterBase.

We can’t tell you when the Prime Minister will call the election, but we all know it’s just around the corner. That means it’s time to start getting plans in place for any campaign websites you’re going to need. Full custom website design and development projects take time, but if you’re short on that precious commodity we can still help. 

We now have two campaign website templates (Candidate and Campaña), which we can help implement with your own branding for a fraction of the time and cost of a custom project. 

It was great to see Yvonne Weldon, the first Aboriginal-Australian candidate for Lord Mayor of Sydney, launch her campaign using the Campaña theme recently; before that the Chamber of Arts and Culture of Western Australia revamped their advocacy just in time for the state elections using the same theme; and Michael Berkman won re-election to parliament in Queensland with the Candidate theme as his website.

We are excited to be in the final stages of launching a new subscription tool to support an improved experience with NationBuilder surveys and other forms. The new tool will allow you to configure a broader range of survey questions all within a single page (including additional question types like multi-select), while also applying relevant tags and paths for people based on their responses. We are currently running a trial with a handful of users right now, and will be launching early in the new year. If you are on the lookout for improved survey solutions for your NationBuilder site and are interested in learning more, let us know.

It has been a pleasure working with the good folk at Essential Media on the creation of the new website for Multicultural Australia, a legendary organisation that for 21 years has been welcoming refugees, people seeking asylum, international students and other new arrivals to Queensland with the goal of creating a fairer, more prosperous society for all Queenslanders.

Everyone loves a good photo, and we reckon a photo competition can be a great way to showcase the beauty, vibrancy and importance of what it is you’re fighting for, at the same time as providing another avenue for supporters to get involved. Our Living Outback have opened the voting for their “people’s choice” award, and we were happy to help out with the digital ballot box.

We recently signed an alliance agreement with NationBuilder which gives us the ability to start offering NationBuilder subscriptions to our clients, at a reduced rate. If you’re looking to switch to NationBuilder, create a new site, or need ongoing NationBuilder support, let us know and we can try and save you some money on subscription fees at the same time :)

It has been a big couple of months for staff movements. Growth Director Paddy McCann has returned to his UK base from a few months’ sojourn in Queensland, Art Director Lully Duque was homeward bound to Bogota, and I have relocated to Sydney after five years in Asia. If you’re ever in the neighbourhood, feel free to get in touch!

Climate strike supporters
Posted by Rhys Forsyth · October 22, 2019 9:48 AM

Multicultural Australia
Posted by Rhys Forsyth · October 22, 2019 9:46 AM

Outback in Focus Photo Competition
Posted by Rhys Forsyth · October 22, 2019 9:45 AM

Free digital consultations for anyone working on COVID-19
Posted by Rhys Forsyth · March 18, 2020 8:40 PM

Tech tip - Improve load speeds by optimising images
Posted by Rhys Forsyth · March 08, 2020 8:48 PM

2020 Reed Awards Winners!
Posted by Rhys Forsyth · March 05, 2020 5:34 PM

At Code Nation we have been nerding out over one of NationBuilder’s latest updates - Bootstrap 4 support for all new custom website themes!

What is Bootstrap 4 and why should we care?

Bootstrap is a super popular, completely free, front-end framework for faster and easier web development. We use it for all of our NationBuilder work, as it lets us create mobile-first, responsive websites for our favourite progressive campaigners.

Since 2018, we’ve been using Bootstrap 4 in our very own base theme created to take advantage of the modern layouts and superior responsiveness provided in the latest version of the framework.

That’s why we’re excited to hear NationBuilder has now made Bootstrap 4 the default for all new custom website themes. Over time this will help simplify the development process for NationBuilder partners like us and, more importantly, deliver improved website quality to customers. Nice one NationBuilder team!

To help celebrate this latest release, we’ll soon be adding our very first offering to the NationBuilder theme marketplace. It’ll be a comprehensive, campaign-focused theme with support for ALL NationBuilder page templates - built entirely on Bootstrap 4 :)