Petitioning the web 2.0 way!
Whether you want to save the whales or bring back John Farnham, there’s an online petition for everything. They’re easy to start and even easier to spread, but when the petition world is overcrowded, and there are so many fans of ‘The Voice’, how will you make your cause stand out?
Submitted
10/28/2009
By
actnow
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689
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Updated
12/2/2009
Photographer : Kylemac @ flickr
When you’re trying to get people to take action online, the trick is to make it simple. It doesn’t get much simpler than petitions, so why then are they losing their edge? Leaving your name no longer does it for the online activist. It’s time your petition did more.
More and more not-for-profit organisations are cottoning on to this fact and are doing their best to jazz up the traditional petition. Petitions have turned into attention grabbers that allow members to engage with the petition personally and visually. They have moved away from using giant blocks of text, and instead are focusing on visuals created by the user. This can be seen in the photo petition, which is establishing itself as an e-activist craze to be reckoned with. Half petition, half blog, photo campaigns are as simple as they sound - you’re still doing a petition, just visually and with the potential to engage a whole new audience.
As part of their anti-violence campaign, ACON has launched a photo petition to be reckoned with. ACON’s This is Oz campaign, like other photo petitions, allows passionate followers to upload a photo of their choice along with an individual comment – something like why they care about this issue, what they’re doing about it, or a witty home-made slogan.
Other petition enthusiasts are doing the same thing minus the photos. Individuals and their comments are represented instead by symbols or on a map. ANTaR has managed to maintain the momentum of a campaign started in 1997 by moving its Sea of Hands online where followers add their virtual hand to show support for their cause.
The moral of the story…
For you a petition might be all about the size of your list, but your petitioners want more. They want to leave their mark, not just their name. Take a look at the Hands up for the Kimberley campaign. It’s interactive, allowing people to upload their own photos and thoughts. Basically, it lets people have their say and in doing so, petitioners are suddenly much more personally involved in the action than if they had just left their name. Yes handing over your petition’s content to who knows who may be a little scary, but flexibility will see your numbers grow.
Now that you’ve gone to a whole lot of effort to make people feel involved, you may as well go that extra yard to making them feel like they belong. A successful petition leaves you with more than a sum of surnames. It builds a sense of community. Even with a diverse range of individual opinions and stories, the overarching message of your campaign still has to be simple. The This is Oz & Sea of Hands campaigns both get the balancing act between the community and the individual right. They both say we all believe in the same thing, or have something in common and therefore are a community, but still highlight the individual’s role in the campaign.
Share the love
When you take the time to show you care, it’s nice to know it’s been noticed. When each petitioner has signed onto your cause send them a simple thank you to your petitioners to remind your signer of who you are, how their action contributes & what else they can do. The benefit being that if you send some love to your signatories, there’s a better chance they’ll share it around. Allow them to spread your petition like wild fire by making it as simple as possible to share around. Invite signatories to pass the petition on by telling a friend (or several).
Money matters
Launching a new photo petition needn’t chew up the marketing budget either. Though you’re welcome to go for the purpose built website, the Faces for Freedom project proves that engaging petitions are do-able for next to nothing. The campaign photo blog runs off free blogging software which can be added to and commented on, and is then linked back to the organisations main website.
Fingers crossed that we haven’t just gone and made the good old fashioned petition a whole lot harder than it seemed. If you’re feeling a bit daunted, or were just never one for petitions, you can always sign a petition against petitions. Petitioning the Web 2.0 way!
This work is licenced under an Attribution licence.
© 2008. First published on actnow.com.au
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