On a recent team call, we realised something that made us pause – and feel a little bit proud of ourselves. Out of the 480 organisations we’ve worked with in the first 5 years of Proca, almost a third come from Germany.
This made us think about just how much we’ve evolved over the years to meet the specific needs of German civil society groups. Today, Proca is trusted equally by big, established groups like Greenpeace DE, and smaller, informal grassroots groups.
So here’s an overview of four ways Proca powers up the change-making work of German CSOs.
1. We’re multilingual and flexible
Proca was built with flexibility in mind. Unlike off-the-shelf tools that assume English-only messaging and rigid templates, Proca is multilingual by default and fully customisable. That means German CSOs can:
- Build widgets for landing pages in German,
- Tailor field labels, button text, consent language, and UI to local norms and campaigning styles,
- Create actions that feel native, not translated.
This flexibility makes Proca especially well suited for coalitions working across regions, languages, and group sizes – and means that local partners in Germany (and elsewhere!) can really make a coalition campaign feel their own. Read more about how Proca is built for coalitions in this article.
2. Built with strong privacy & security standards
Data privacy isn’t just a “nice to have” in Germany, but a legal and ethical cornerstone of public campaigning. Proca takes data privacy and security very seriously:
- All supporter data is encrypted, including in transit and at rest (when we get your encryption key),
- Proca follows strong data-protection practices aligned with GDPR and German privacy expectations, and our clients can choose how long data is retained and how it is stored,
- Proca doesn’t access any personal data of people who take action using our campaign widgets: we do not commodify personal information nor rent or sell private data to advertisers,
- Proca runs on dedicated servers based in Germany that use green electricity to operate and ensure no private data leaves the European privacy protection regime,
- We’re open source and our code is transparent and verifiable,
- Our software and processes have been audited by the German Federal Office for Information Security and certified to host European Citizens’ Initiatives (before the European Commission changed the regulations and removed the ability for independent hosting).
3. Double Opt-In Workflows
Proca supports robust consent management workflows, so that organisations never have to guess whether someone really agreed to hear from them.
- Proca’s double opt-in for email subscriptions ensures every address is verified before being added to your lists,
- Custom consent text lets you collect opt-ins for specific communication types,
- Consent records are stored and can be pushed to your CRM automatically, so you can demonstrate lawful permissions if needed.
We have a post dedicated to all the possible workflows and their features – check it out!
In our experience, our German clients tend to interpret the European and German privacy laws in ways that require strict consent rules. Proca is here to ensure not only compliance – but also high conversion rates, and a great experience for supporters and action-takers.
4. Ready-made target datasets for German and EU advocacy
Proca comes with several off-the-shelf target datasets that make it easy to build geographically and politically targeted actions without sourcing contact data yourself.
Current datasets particularly useful to our German clients include:
- Members of the Bundestag,
- MEPs representing German constituencies,
- German mayors and local government representatives.
Need something different? Proca lets you upload custom target lists too — whether you’re targeting state ministries, regional councils, associations, or other officials.
Read this for more details about our custom and off-the-shelf datasets.