At Proca we focus on one thing: the action. Our toolkit is rigorously tested and optimised to give campaigners and supporters a top-of-the-line experience. But every good campaign also needs something else: a strong landing page.
Proca is not a CMS (content management system) – it’s an action tool. We don’t try to replace your website, and we don’t generate a landing page when you set up a campaign. Instead, we plug into the tools you already use.
For most organisations that’s actually the best setup – everyone already has a website. Your existing CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc) handles the creation and management of pages, branding and content. Proca powers the actions and supporter journey.
When using Proca for your digital campaigns, you usually have three options:
- Use your organisation’s existing website
- Create a new dedicated campaigning website for your organisation
- Build a one-off microsite for one specific, limited time campaign
All of these approaches work well with Proca, but they come with different trade-offs.
Option 1: Use your organisation’s main website
For most organisations, this is the easiest and most practical option. Each organisation already has a website and someone on staff trained to manage it. Proca works with the existing tech stack rather than duplicating it.
Pros
- It’s cost-effective. Your website already exists, so there’s no need to build or host something new.
- Your branding is already there. Layouts, colours and fonts are already aligned with your organisation.
- No new tools to learn. Campaigners can work inside the CMS they already know.
- Simpler maintenance and security. You maintain one platform instead of two.
For many organisations, these advantages outweigh everything else.
Cons
That said, some organisational websites are not designed with campaigning in mind.
Many have:
- complex navigation menus
- heavy headers and footers
- lots of links and opportunities for the supporter to get sidetracked
All of these can distract supporters from the main goal: taking action.
There’s another common issue too: legacy systems. If your organisation’s website hasn’t been updated in years, launching campaigns inside it might feel slow and frustrating. Sometimes, there’s no internal clarity when it comes to who is responsible for updating and maintaining the website – and is it the same person who works on campaign content? In those cases, separating the campaign site from the main website can actually speed things up.
Option 2: A dedicated campaign site
If, for any reason, your organisation’s existing website is not a good fit for digital campaigning, you always have the option of creating a dedicated campaigning website. A site like that have its own (sub( domain, and would be home to only your organisation’s digital actions – a hub for digital activism for your supporters, like act.example.org
There are some clear advantages of going this way. A new, dedicated site would allow you to really optimise for conversions – moving passive visitors into action and helping them become active supporters of your cause. You can do this by having:
- minimal navigation, simple menus
- fewer distractions, less content
- potentially faster loading times
- more freedom with layout and/or branding, depending on your choices
It can also make experimentation and testing easier without touching your organisation’s main website or jumping through complicated internal hoops.
Our team has worked with several organisations on creating a custom campaigning page + action page package into a single complete plateform, and we’re always happy to discuss it.
Option 3: a campaign microsite
Sometimes a standalone, dedicated campaign site is the best option, especially for these cases:
- a one-off campaign
- a campaign with a strong visual identity
- a site designed purely for conversions (e.g. landing page for ads)
- a site to host a coalition campaign with its own branding
A campaign microsite, similar to a dedicated campaign site, lets you simplify navigation and limit the content and actions available, to keep the visitor’s focus on the action you want them to take.
Our recommendation
We’ve worked with more than 500 organisations and the recommendation we’ve starting making 5 years ago still rings true. If possible, use your existing website. The benefits usually outweigh the downsides.
This means that you can create a dedicated campaign page under your existing domain, and embed the Proca action there in minutes.
But if you do need a separate campaign site, here are two setups we often recommend.
For one-off microsites:
Use a static site generator like Astro. Static sites are extremely fast, very secure, and cheap (or even free) to host. They can also handle huge spikes in traffic. A recent example: denmarkification.com
For organisations running regular campaigns:
A separate WordPress site works very well. It’s flexible, widely supported, and easy for campaign teams to manage. We have used several clean and efficient campaign optimised templates and performance focused cache plugins with CDNs to guarantee your site will stay up even when your campaign goes viral.
The Proca widget is designed to work with any CMS, and it can be used to control what content is displayed on the page, based on the user’s action. Check out this article about StepContext, or building killer landing pages, for more information on what makes a good landing page, and practical guidance on how to set one up in WordPress.