Clear company values at the office of Change.org in Kemang. (JG Photo/Nadine Freischlad)
June 2014 marks the second anniversary of the Indonesian office of global online-petition website Change.org.
Much has been written about the platform’s successes in Indonesia — one prominent case was the call to stop a mining endeavor on the island of Bangka. But what are the mechanisms that make Change.org an effective campaigning tool, and what are the benefits of “technology-assisted petitions?”
I spoke with Dhenok Pratiwi and Arief Aziz, the two Indonesian representatives of Change.org, at their office in Jakarta.
Could you sum up the basic mechanisms of how an online petition works at change.org?
On our platform, anyone can start a petition. It consists of a page describing the cause and an appeal to a “target person”: a decision maker with the power to take influence a on the cause. The petition starter’s goal is to gather as many signatures as possible, with the aim to pressure the decision maker into taking a stance.
What effect does the target of the petition feel?
The immediate effect is that it floods their email. Each signature generates an email. After a certain point, every 5 signatures make 1 email and so on. There’s an aspect of annoyance, but email is not enough. The target can block an email address, or send it to the spam folder.
The second step is to turn that annoyance into inconvenience. If the target has a twitter account, we insert their username on the petition title, so every time the petition is shared, he gets mentioned.
Sometimes, a petition makes it into the media. He may have ignored the emails and tweets, but what if his niece comes up to him and says: “Hey, i just saw this petition, and it is targeting you! What’s going on?” He might start to reconsider the policies he’s been making.
We call this process “escalating.” The petition and the petition supporters are a great base around which to mobilize. If needed, you can go protesting in front of his building.
It’s quite easy to sign a petition. All you need is an email address. How do you ensure the signatures are real?
We have some guards. If there are an unusual amount of signers from one IP address, that’s suspicious. If there’s an unusual bump in signature growth, we get contacted and we can check whether we had a specific activity around that time or not. In our experience, the number of people who try to game this is miniscule.
How many signatures are required to make a petition successful?
The number of signatures doesn’t guarantee success. There’s no top limit to a petition, unless the starter wants to set a limit. The target number of the signature counter tool on the petition page changes: If you only have two signatures, it will say “98 more to 100”. When you get to 100, it changes to 500, whichever step is next. It’s a way to show progress. If people see that bar they want to complete it.
Decision makers don’t care about the number — more important is acceleration. If you get 10 signatures now, but tomorrow 100, the next day 1000, they start worrying. The decision maker has to realize he’s getting more and more pressure from society, and that it could become viral.
Can the petition starter continue communication with the signers?
There are limitations. If there are more than 15,000 signatures, they can send an update to the signers, but it has to go through us first. We don’t want them to misuse the platform for spam. Also, they can’t email more than 5 times a week or more than twice a day.
What have you learned about successful petitions over the years? How are your experiences reflected in updates to the platform?
We are constantly developing technologies with the goal to become a platform where users drive the petition from start to end. Right now, we still play a part. We seek out promising petitions, help them by choosing the right pictures and wording.
One important update we made was to introduce a “response tool“. With this feature, the target of a petition can immediately respond to the emails they are getting. This will show up on the page for the petition signers.
We want true connectivity. We can’t just look at it from the point of view of petition starters, but ignore the decision maker. They also need tools to listen to us and communicate with us. If done right, a two-way petition tool could have a great impact.
Our next step is to get commitments from decision makers. We want to propose to Jakarta acting governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) to use Change.org as part of his program to listen to the people’s needs? Any petition that gets over, say, 5,000 signatures, gets discussed. This type of dialogue is our mission.
By Nadine Freischlad on 02:19 pm Jun 17, 2014
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