★Do online petitions such as those by Change or Avaaz actually do anything? If so, what changes have they made? After Change.org campaigns, a judge ordered shackles removed from a 13-year-old suspect, the National Park Service reversed its position and reinstated a ban on plastic bottles in the Grand Canyon, Amazon pulled whale and dolphin meat products from its site.[1] [P]rotests on change.org, which prompted the FCC to “look into the matter” [of plans for a $2 “convenience” fee for one-off online payments], Verizon reversed its position just one day later.[2] ASK TO ANSWER Kai Stinchcombe Following Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, tonight Kraft became the third major corporation to announce its departure from the right-wing business front group ALEC.[3] But youre right – typically, petitions are incredibly ineffective in themselves. They serve three purposes: A focal point for the media – you can never get a newspaper story tons of people want Coca-Cola to pull sponsorship of the Olympics over anti-gay discrimation. But a million people signed a petition asking Coca-Cola to pull sponsorship of the Olympics is a headline for sure. A way to spread awareness socially – people often ask their friends to sign a petition, and then their friends will read about and understand the argument, in a way that if you just wrote a letter explaining your point of view, nobody would forward it to all their friends. Page on change.org gets two million visitors a day – if it was just people posting their opinions without asking for signatures, its hard to imagine it having the same reach. A way to collect activists – if you get a million signatures, maybe there are ten thousand people who will go on and take another step – writing to a member of congress, making a donation, etc. People always complain about getting spammed when they sign online petitions. Thats the point! You expressed an interest in the issue, and theyre inviting you to do something meaningful about it. There are lots of examples of a press firestorm pushing an organization to take action. And there are gazillions of examples of a petition being the starting point of a successful real-world campaign. MoveOn.Org, for example, started as a petition for Congress to censure President Clinton and move on and has since raised tens of millions of dollars and became one of the most important advocacy organizations in the US.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 08:22:20 +0000
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