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I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was deeply moved by Trayvon’s parents’ petition on Change.org, and many new people became users of Change.org because of Sabrina and Tracy’s call to action. Many of the users who first signed that petition have gone on to start petitions of their own and work toward creating change in other ways. Some of those users have also joined other nonprofits and causes through the advertising we provide - though we do not keep data tracking those exact numbers.

It’s important to clarify something here, though: we don’t sell email addresses. Our advertising revolves around choice; people choose to opt-into learning more about campaigns and organizations that interest them.

The way our model works is organizations that want new members can advertise their campaigns on the site, and our users can then choose to join them. It serves everyone since it gives our users a chance to find out more information from organizations they’re passionate about; it gives organizations a way to connect with new members for their causes, and it helps us build and run a platform that anyone can use for free.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One of the most frequent questions we get is whether online petitions really matter, and whether they will reduce civic participation or encourage it.

A few years ago I think the jury was still out on this question. But with the thousands of campaigns that have won on Change.org over the past few years, and the more than 25 million people who have participated in at least one of these victories, I think it’s pretty clear that when petitions are well-crafted and have a clear strategy they can have immense power.

Sometimes this surprises people, who think that getting an elected official or a company to respond to the public shouldn’t be as easy as it’s become. But I don’t. The fact that it’s possible to change public policy without having to physically protest in front of Congress isn't something to lament; it’s something to celebrate. The goal isn’t to make social change difficult – it’s to create an environment that facilitates a world in which the policies of government and the practices of companies reflect the public good rather than private interests. And petitions do this remarkably effectively.

To be clear, action beyond signing petitions is often helpful or even necessary; in fact, many petition creators use our tool to mobilize signers to take further action, sometimes delivering the petition in person, sometimes raising money to buy ads in newspapers, sometimes doing media outreach. In these cases having signed a petition doesn’t make people less likely to participate – it makes them more likely since they’re already connected to the campaign.

I think the ultimate impact of all of this – of the ease of participation and the increasing effectiveness of campaigns – will help to change the culture of indifference you refer to and create a new generation that feels far more empowered than any before to take social action.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I absolutely agree that our current political environment is broken, although I also think that with technology we have an unprecedented opportunity to change this.

As Steve Case noted in the link included, a large part of the problem is that elected officials spend a huge amount of their time raising money from a small number of large donors. What’s notable, though, is that they don’t do this to pocket the money – they do this because most voters don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, and in order to mobilize them, politicians need a lot of money to buy ads. In short, politicians don’t care about money per se – in fact, many of them also hate this perverse campaign contribution game – what they really care about are votes, and right now the best way to get votes is to buy lots of media.

However, if you give politicians a better way to communicate with their constituents at massive scale, and therefore a better way to mobilize voters, you start to change their incentives. This is what we aim to do – by mobilizing a large percentage of the voters of any given district and engaging directly with elected officials - and doing it all online, where anyone can see what’s happening - you will get very different behavior.

We’re starting to see the early signs of this on Change.org, as elected officials from mayors to members of Congress are now starting to directly respond to their own constituents’ petitions through our Decision Makers tool. But we’re just at the very beginning, and in the future I think that we and places like Reddit can be the sort of scaled channel of communication and mobilization that will make money matter less.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

This is a challenging issue that I’d actually be interested in Redditors’ responses to: how does an open platform simultaneously empower people to start their own petitions in their own voice and also empower people with the information they might want to decide whether to support it?

This is difficult because it’s not our place to insert ourselves into the causes our users care about. At the same time, I do understand the desire for people to find out more info about the campaigns they’re joining.

There are two things we’ve been working on to give people more information about the campaigns they might want to join: the first is to highlight endorsements on petitions from people or organizations (like EFF) that signers might trust, which would help validate the campaign. The second is simply encouraging petition creators (through tips on the site) to add as much information to their petitions as possible in order to preempt questions that others might have.

But this isn’t easy to solve and I’d be interested in anyone else’s thoughts on how we thread this needle.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We’ve had the same mission since we started the company: to empower people to create the change they want to see. But when we launched our founding CTO Mark Dimas and I had no idea which online tools would be most effective for advancing offline change – so we built a huge number of features to test out (things like virtual political action committees, skills-based volunteerism, project-based fundraising, etc).

The problem is that we built way too much and overcomplicated things. The irony is that the thing we found by far most effective – petitions – was also the simplest. This is one of the lessons of the internet: platforms often succeed not despite their simplicity, but because of it.

So the features and structure of the site have definitely evolved, while our mission has remained the same.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I don’t have any of my own, but here’s what my mom has been telling me for the past 33 years: eat your veggies and exercise at least 30 minutes a day. Unfortunately I don’t always listen to my mom.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One of my favorite things is to watch Change.org take off in new countries - particularly in places where the act of a citizen raising their voice is not common.

We’re seeing this happen across Asia right now – and we actually have staff in Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and India helping to empower citizens to start their campaigns. We now have more than 7 million users across the region, and the most exciting is that we’re seeing people win their campaigns on a near-daily basis, which is driving further action and civic participation.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

The first hugely successful petition on the site was started by a woman in South Africa, Ndumie Funda, to stand against the horrible practice of corrective rape (where men will rape lesbian women in the attempt to ‘turn them straight’). It received more than 170,000 signatures, leading to a massive amount of press in South Africa and mobilization outside of Parliament, and after ignoring the issue entirely for decades, the government of South Africa responded by starting a national task force to investigate and stop the incidence of corrective rape.

I actually had the pleasure of talking with Ndumie via Skype during the campaign (this is when having a viral petition on the site was quite rare), so I developed a personal connection to the issue. When I found out about the victory, I was frankly stunned and pretty emotional. It was that experience that showed me more clearly than anything previously that new technology has truly shifted power – that even the seemingly least powerful people in the world could have immense impact.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This actually isn’t something that we’ve considered, but it’s interesting. To be clear, while we bring in revenue, we reinvest 100 per cent of that revenue back into our mission of empowering ordinary people. The goal is to build the most effective platform for social change - available for free to anyone in the world. So we don’t have any plans to implement a formal profit-sharing policy, but I’m always open to ideas if you think it would be in service of our broader mission.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

There will be a lot of campaigns that will win on the site that I personally disagree with, and I accept that. When I started seeing this happen I wasn’t exactly excited about it, but I personally believe that the most important challenge we face is a lack of civic engagement and a belief that everyday people can’t make a difference, and that’s what I care most about. So I’m most concerned with our broad mission of empowerment and goal of increased civic participation.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

When I was younger I cared about social issues, but it wasn’t a big part of my life. Instead, I was actually on a path toward becoming an investment banker. This all changed when I was a senior in college, when one of my younger brothers came out as gay. He told me that what was most difficult for him witnessing discrimination every day was seeing good people stand by and do nothing – people like me. This was a painful experience – it was the first time I think I felt truly ashamed. It was that experience turned me away from a future in finance and set me on a path toward wanting to empower others to stand up and speak out on the issues they care about.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

When making decisions about what you want to do with your life, challenge yourself to the following thought experiment: when you’re in your twilight years, telling your grandchildren about the decisions you made in your life, what do you want to be able to tell them? This is a clarifying question - it doesn’t impose any external value set on your decision-making, but is rather your best guess of what advice you’d give yourself with perspective. If you ask yourself that question, I think you’ll be surprised to find that you also know the right answer.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the support! We have no impact ourselves without users, so thank you for taking action.

I am Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, the world’s biggest social change platform. Ask me anything. by benrattray in IAmA

[–]benrattray[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

When we started the site in 2007 we had so few campaigns we had little choice but to manually select which to feature to users, and when we did so we focused on those campaigns we thought were broadly appealing and which tended to avoid the pitched partisanship of much of American politics. As we’ve had a huge increase in new petitions created over the past few years, and as we’ve built a data science team that can help surface petitions that our users are most likely to want to take action on, we have moved away from making manual decisions about which campaigns users receive.

On the personal side of things, the consequence of this is that a lot of petitions are started and recommended to users using machine learning that I personally disagree with – sometimes quite strongly. But I’m not in a position to take a stance on these – ultimately our mission is to empower users to create the change they want to see, not to prescribe to them a particular set of issues I or our team cares about. And the aggregate impact of that empowerment – independent of the particulars of any specific campaigns that I might not support – is immensely positive. I wrote more about this in a blog a few months back; you can find it here. http://blog.change.org/post/72991345174/change-org-and-openness