Proca-powered digital campaigning tools come with an action counter. It’s a well-known feature: a progress bar displays the number of signatures on a petition, emails sent to target, or other actions taken online by your supporters.
So what’s so important about it?
Social proof
Seeing a live counter of how many people have signed, supported, or shared an action builds momentum. It motivates others to take part, and gives your audience a visible sense of impact.
For a supporter, the action counter isn’t just a number – it’s a sign of collective power and momentum. Having this visual confirmation that others support the action makes people more likely to join your campaign – that’s the magic of social proof.
Proca also allows you to hide the counter until a specific action threshold is met. It might feel demotivating to the first supporters to sign an action that no one else supports yet – so some organisations choose to only show the action counter after e.g. 900 signatures have been collected.
Flexible placement and goals
Proca allows for different ways of displaying the action counter. It can be static or animated to show the growing momentum. It can be shown to website visitors as an integral part of the action form, usually at the very top. Or, it can be separate from the form and used in a completely different part of the website, for instance linked from a blog post with a call to action, or even from a mailing.
The goal displayed on the action counter is also flexible and customisable, and it can change to reflect the progress of your campaign. You might have started with a goal of 10,000 signatures, but what if your campaign goes viral? No problem: you can easily set up the counter to update the goal, to always show that the objective is to collect more actions than the current count – unless you choose otherwise.
Only real signatures
One of the challenges with simple counters, especially in coalition campaigns, is accidentally overcounting signatures. Imagine that the same person signs an action multiple times through different widgets. Maybe they saw the call to action on multiple channels (e.g. took the action from an email, forgot, then took the action again when they saw a social media post). Or maybe the same person follows two different organisations involved in the same partnership campaign, and engaged with both groups’ call to take action.
Most action counters would simply add the signature without question. Proca avoids this with automatic deduplication: the platform recognises repeat submissions that use the same email address, across all partner widgets, and counts each supporter only once. This ensures your totals reflect unique engagement, and keeps the public numbers of campaign supporters credible.
Shared counters for distributed campaigns
In coalition or distributed campaigns, each partner can host a Proca widget on their own site while still feeding into a shared campaign counter. This gives everyone a common story of scale and impact without forcing organisations to hand over supporter data to each other. This shared counter becomes a powerful motivator and signal of collective strength.
Manually adjusting the counter
Many campaigns don’t only collect online signatures. You might already have hundreds or thousands collected offline, or gathered by partner organisations who aren’t using a Proca widget. With Proca you can set the counter to add any number of actions, so your online count reflects total support from all channels and sources.
For each campaign, you can create multiple offline signature collection widgets, and each of them will add signatures to the shared counter. This feature is particularly useful for volunteer teams who collect signatures during events, e.g. using paper forms or tablets, because it allows you to easily track individual volunteer’s progress.
Synchronising with external partners
When working with partner organisations who aren’t using a Proca widget, but collecting signatures using their own campaigning tool, we offer an easy and fast way to synchronise the action counter.
The way it can work:
- Manually. We can create a “dummy widget” for external partners to feed into the main campaign counter. The partner doesn’t use the widget for actual signature collection, but they update the number of actions manually.
- Automatically using an API. The “dummy widget” we create for the external partner is automatically updated with the number of actions taken on the partner’s website using a piece of code which the partner needs to apply on their end.
- Like above, except we already worked with the system that your external partner is using, and we can run the API and fetch the signature count on our end.
We can also provide an API for your external partner to update their action counter with the signatures collected by the coalition.
While there are sometimes valid reasons for coalition partners to use their existing digital action tools, using Proca widgets for each campaign partner is the only way to ensure that each action only counts once: we can’t automatically deduplicate signatures added from external sources. And remember, Proca can easily integrate with most CRMs!
Numbers can help create impact
Clean, accurate action counts aren’t just nice to have – they help your campaign succeed.
- Show real movement and legitimacy to your campaign targets,
- Inspire supporters to join when they see momentum,
- Combine efforts across online and offline channels in one visible total.
With Proca’s action counter, your campaign’s progress becomes both transparent and trustworthy.