The action counter is the progress bar showing how many people have taken action on your campaign – signed the petition, sent a message to target, and so on. It looks like a simple number, but a few things happen behind the scenes that make it worth understanding.
It motivates people to join
Seeing that others have already acted makes people more likely to act too – it’s a visible sign of momentum. If your campaign is just getting started, you can choose to hide the counter until you’ve hit a certain number of actions, so early numbers don’t look discouraging.
It only counts real, unique people
If the same supporter signs more than once – say, from an email and later from a social media post – the counter won’t count them twice. This works even across different partner widgets in the same campaign, so your total stays accurate and credible.
It can be shared across partner organisations
In coalition campaigns, each partner can run their own widget on their own site while all of them feed into one shared counter – without anyone having to hand over their supporter data to the others.
You can add offline or external numbers too
Collected paper signatures at an event, or numbers from a partner using a different tool? These can be added to the counter manually, or synced automatically if the partner’s platform supports it. See how to add those extra supporters.
Note: Automatic deduplication only works within the same system. If a partner adds their numbers separately rather than using a Proca widget, their actions can’t be automatically checked against yours for duplicates.
The goal change as you grow
The goal isn’t fixed – it’s always set a bit ahead of your current count. For example, with 50 actions collected, the goal might show as 100; once you pass 100, it moves up to show 200. This way the counter always shows you working toward the next milestone, without you having to update it by hand every time you get close.
Read also: What’s so special about the Proca action counter?