Mapping Collective Action: A Virtual Journey Powered by Every Step

As a small charity, connection and community is vital. This year for Small Charity Week 2025, we supported Keeping Abreast in their goal to unite their volunteers across the country as part of a nationwide activity, whilst raising vital funds to continue their personalised support to women across the country facing reconstruction surgery due to breast cancer.

The key to enabling participation across a group of people sited all over the country is to ensure there are minimal barriers to entry. The activity needed to be simple to understand, easy to participate with and fun to follow.

Following on from our successful March In March campaign, we engaged with our friends at Keeping Abreast create a bespoke solution that allowed volunteers all over to participate in a nationwide walk, dubbed 'Step Up To Support!'. 

The concept is simple: participants are encouraged to get outside and walk, run, play - anything they can to show support for their charity. As steps - or optionally, time spent in minutes - are submitted to the platform, the volunteers’ cumulative efforts are charted against a predefined route between all of the KA offices on a branded map. This is a wonderful way to represent how the combined massive efforts of the volunteers can achieve some really impressive distances.

Communicated via a series of mailers (created by the lovely ladies at the charity) a single link provides each volunteer with a secure and personal log-in to their walk tracking dashboard. From here each volunteer can log their progress, see a graphical representation of the cumulative efforts of their volunteer peers, read more about the campaign and even make a donation directly. Additionally, each volunteer has a set of pre-defined milestones that align with important statistics about breast cancer and the effects it has on sufferers.

Participants were also given the opportunity to set up their own personal goal, also reflected graphically on their personalised dashboard.

Maximising inclusivity, any user of the platform can pick from a wide selection of activities; from walking or running, through to tennis, weightlifting, pickleball and even housework and gardening! Behind the scenes, our platform calculates the equivalent step count and adds this to the user's personalised dashboard.

Our platform, responsive to all device types, included tools for the staff at KA to be able to manage submissions, access technical support technical and extract key statistics – which all proved to be extremely easy to use!

With the help of our bespoke platform, Keeping Abreast raised over £1000 and recorded over 1.5 million steps over a one-week activity. The activity has attracted an impressive amount of press coverage featuring in local news outlets.

The Digital Team at Pb really enjoyed the opportunity to support Keeping Abreast on this campaign, and look forward to working on similar projects in the future!