Five tips for getting a campaign out fast
Need to launch a campaign page quickly? Here's what we'd tell you.
This week we helped Choose Love launch something a bit different - and we think it’s pretty clever. On May 16th, Tommy Robinson is organising a far-right march through London. The idea? Turn it into a fundraiser.
The further they march, the more people raise for refugees, displaced people and anti-racism in the UK. Every metre, a pledge - every step counts, quite literally.
We built the page that makes it possible, and had a very short window to do it. Tommy Chooses Love is live and raised over £10,000 in its first day, and counting.
Here's what we'd tell anyone who wants to move this fast:
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1. Duplicate what already exists
There's no shame in reusing tried and tested tech. We didn't build a new donations platform - we built a purposely simple campaign page and let GoCardless do the heavy lifting on payments, donor lists, and all the fiddly financial bits.
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2. A fast campaign is a good excuse to experiment
When you're moving quickly and keeping things simple, you have permission to try something different. For this one, it's a pledges-first, payment-later model — supporters commit an amount per metre marched, with a cap on what they'll be charged, and payment is only taken once the distance is known. It's a small UX decision with a big emotional payoff: you're committing to something that hasn't happened yet, which makes the whole thing feel more like solidarity than a transaction.
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3. Be okay with it being an MVP, and be ready and willing to iterate
Nothing on this site is precious. If something needs refining based on what you’re learning - the slider, the copy, the ask - it can change! Treating it as an ongoing learning experience from the start means you're learning in public rather than defending decisions that may have been made in a room months ago. Campaigns that respond to news need to move as quickly as news does.
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4. Get your sign-offs sorted before you start
The hardest part of a fast turnaround isn't the build - it's the approval chain. Get the right people in the room early, with an open mind and the authority to say yes. A campaign can be ready to go live and then sit in someone's inbox for three days. That's the bit that kills the momentum.
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5. Only build what you actually need
This campaign page is deliberately simple. It does one job well and hands off everything else to tools that already exist. In an era where many digital projects start with a long list of features, there's something quietly radical about a site like this that's genuinely just what it needs to be.
