How we helped raise €1.3M for a presidential campaign (and what we learned)
Hey IH 👋. I'm one of the builders behind Orgo, a digital governance platform for mid to large organizations. We recently wrapped up a pretty wild ride:
Over 3 months, between April and May 2025, our platform powered a grassroots campaign that raised €1.3M from 18,700+ donors for the new President of Romania, Nicușor Dan.
It’s the biggest individual donation campaign in the country’s political history.
Here’s how we did it:
1. Donor UX first, always.
We obsessed over making giving feel rewarding. A real-time public leaderboard, optional donor wall messages (we got over 10k!), mobile-friendly forms, and default recurring donation nudges made a big difference. Every detail mattered.
2. Compliance isn’t sexy, but it’s everything.
Romania requires donor ID verification + real-time reporting to electoral authorities. We built OCR identity checks and direct reporting into the flow. No campaign staff had to lift a finger for compliance.
3. Real-time data = trust + performance.
We gave campaign teams and donors a dashboard to see exactly where the money was coming from and what was working. That helped them double down on high-ROI channels fast.
4. Stripe did the heavy lifting for payments.
We integrated local currency donations through Stripe, and the APIs handled edge cases like bank redirects or card retries better than any local alternative.
What we learned:
People will give if it feels good and feels right. UX is persuasion.
Legal compliance can (and should) be invisible to end-users.
Real-time dashboards are must-haves for campaign teams.
Building infrastructure for high-volume fundraising is hard. A single crash can kill momentum. We overinvested in uptime, and it paid off.
However, we didn’t build Orgo just for fundraising. We do governance, events, memberships, and more, but this campaign showed us how powerful purpose-driven tech can be when you remove all the blockers.
Happy to share more details or war stories if helpful 🙌
