Welcome! If you were just invited to join a digital campaign coalition using Proca, but you’re not sure what to expect and how it works, this short guide is for you. If you prefer a different format, here are some friendly slides.
🧑💻 What’s a digital campaign?
Digital campaigning is when we use digital technology to mobilise large groups of people to take specific actions, to change something in the world. It could look like:
- A mass online petition to members of the Parliament to adopt a new law
- A “mail to target” action asking a Minister to ban the use of a dangerous substance
- Countless other examples of channeling online actions into real world impacts
Digital campaigns often work hand-in-hand with other campaigning tactics: advocacy, research, media work, grassroots organising, and mass mobilisation. Some of the most successful recent campaigns use all these tactics together, putting pressure on their targets from all sides.
Digital campaigns work in different ways:
- Amplifying demands, research or stories to help the public relate to campaign asks
- Mobilising people for online actions in support of the campaign demands
- Fundraising to support the campaign and your organisation
- Connecting supporters to build a sense of community, shared power and impact
- Popularising sometimes complex policy demands by making them accessible to regular people
Digital campaigns can be incredibly effective, because they go beyond just sharing information: they transform the motivations and actions of thousands of people into real-life pressure on campaign targets. Done well, a digital campaign is a powerful tool: responsive, fast, accessible, measurable.
📣 Why should you join a coalition campaign?
Campaigns are more powerful when there are many organisations working together for a common goal. This is particularly true for digital campaigns: more organisations can reach more people, and mobilise more actions in support of campaign demands. More voices raised together means we can be louder, and heard more clearly.
Why is it worth it for your organisation to partner up?
- Expanded reach and new audiences. Joining a coalition campaign on a new topic will allow you to reach new people with your message or content. This is true both for digital-first organisations with large email lists, as well as for smaller, local groups focused on education or advocacy.
- More people mobilised = more pressure on target. Whether your organisation already has a large supporter base, or public outreach isn’t your priority: everyone’s campaign efforts will benefit from the shared campaign action counter. A visible number of action-takers can only help motivate others to join in, and show decision-makers the scale of support for a cause.
- Intelligence and knowledge sharing. Coalitions thrive when different partner organisations play to their strengths. Groups focused on research or policy bring in-depth understanding of the often complex topics, that other organisations might not have. Campaigning and communications-oriented partners use their skills to translate these issues into easy-to-understand, compelling language that inspires and mobilises supporters. National organisations often have relationships with specific decision-makers, or can organise local constituents for a more targeted pressure. No matter the size, focus or strength or your organisation, there’s a place for you in a coalition campaign.
- Resource and tool sharing. Coalitions allow organizations to share resources and capacity. Better resourced groups can support smaller or grassroots partners. Pooling resources allows coalitions to develop more complex, custom-built actions – such as automatic submissions to EU Commission consultations – which would otherwise be too expensive for a single group, or too difficult to align between multiple groups using different tech. Collecting signatures together using Proca means the action counter reliably represents public support: each email only counts once. Proca is specifically built to enable and power up partnerships. Our toolkit is accessible to all kinds of groups, we offer 50+ language, flexible pricing and swift technical support.
🤖 What exactly does it mean to “join a campaign”?
To join a coalition campaign on Proca, you don’t need to have prior digital campaigning experience or technical skills. All you need is a bit of time, a website, and willingness to share the campaign with your audience – your supporters, members, followers or subscribers.
When you join a campaign, you get to set up your own easy-to-use Proca campaign “widget”. The widget includes a form to collect supporter actions (petition signatures, messages sent to target, etc), and a smart share action for signers to mobilise even more support. It’s great because:
- The widget is very easy to set up and feature on your website: no more complicated than embedding a YouTube video.
- The widget can be customised to match your website’s look and feel: you can use your colours, messaging, logos and branding, and your website’s language.
- All supporter actions from all partner widgets count together, feeding into a shared campaign action counter. That creates visible collective momentum and demonstrates the real power people have when we act together.
- Each partner keeps full control over their own supporter contact information, and there is no need for complex data sharing. You can always access and download the data, or we can integrate directly with your mailer.
Joining a distributed campaign usually means that the coalition effort is coordinated by one organisation joined by multiple partners. When your organisation joins as a partner, here’s exactly what you’ll need to do:
- Set up your Proca account. Your campaign lead (or the Proca team) will send you an invite to our campaign hub to create your account.
- Create your campaign widget. We’ll generate a version of the campaign widget tailored to your organisation. We can adjust the colours and logo to match your branding, and the widget can be configured in almost any language.
- Embed the widget on your site. Proca widgets are added to your website by pasting a short snippet of HTML code into your CMS. It’s as simple as embedding a YouTube video.
- Test before launch. Before going live, we should test the action to make sure everything runs smoothly – from the supporter experience to (in Mail-to-Target campaigns) the target’s journey. We have guides to help you out.
- Share with your audience. Promote the campaign using your preferred channels: direct mailings to supporters perform best, but you can also use your social media or newsletters, etc. The goal is to build visible growing pressure, and the more you promote and share, the more you’ll see the numbers grow.
🛠️ I’d like to join, but what if I need support?
The Proca team is available to help you at every step. We have helpful step-by-step guides, instructional videos, and FAQs. Here’s a taste:
- Is there a guide I can follow? Yes! We’ve put together step-by-step instructions to walk you through the whole process. And if you get stuck, our friendly support team is always happy to help.
- Will I need to get IT involved? Not necessarily. If someone on your team knows their way around your website’s CMS, you likely won’t need any extra technical help. We’ve supported many organisations with limited budgets and no in-house tech team — and they’ve launched their campaigns without a hitch.
- Can Proca integrate with our CRM? Absolutely. Proca can be integrated with many common CRMs so that supporter data flows directly into your system. We regularly build these custom connections. There’s an additional cost for CRM integration, but we keep it competitive — especially if we’ve worked with your CRM before. Just get in touch and we’ll be happy to talk you through the options.
- Can my organisation fundraise? We have the option to add a donation step with credit card integration, but most organisations prefer we integrate with their existing donation tool. We regularly build these integrations and hopefully we have already integrated the donation platform you are using. Just get in touch and we’ll be happy to talk you through the options.
- Do you comply with GDPR? Yes, and we can sign a Data Provider Agreement with your organisation. Many organisations have different ways to collect GDPR consent (online only, via email only, double opt-in etc) and we support more than 10 different workflows. You can contact us if you want a specific solution.
- Who pays for the campaign widget? That depends on the campaign setup. In some cases, the lead organisation covers the cost for partner widgets; in others, partners pay for their own. As of June 2025, the cost for a partner widget is €100 (net).
- Can I use my existing campaign tool and still join as a partner? Joining a campaign on Proca typically means using the Proca widget. In some cases organisations can choose to use their existing campaign tools and forego the benefits of a shared campaign counter. If this is your case, speak to the lead coalition partner or campaign organiser first. On the technical side, we do have some options for manual syncs, updates and deduplication and we can see what we can do.
🤝 Still Have Questions?
Just reach out (contact@fixthestatusquo.org), or speak to the lead organisation you’re working with — and we’ll be happy to help!