Idealware intends to provide rigorous reviews of many different kinds of nonprofit software. However, it will take some time to create all these detailed reviews. Our A Few Good Tools series provides some thoughts in the meantime by recommending software that is used and liked by the Idealware community. They may not be the very best of their kind, but they have worked well for us. Perhaps they will also work for you.

Looking to win friends and influence people? When used as part of a larger strategy, online petitions can be useful in doing both.

Petitions with strong support can circulate beyond your current circle as supporters forward them to their friends. Thus, they can be useful in building a list of people interested in your cause. With a comprehensive follow-up strategy – informing those who have opted in about progress and asking them to take further steps – some of the signers can often be converted into activists or donors.

It’s important to make sure that the signatures will help in actually influencing the opinion of public officials or companies or you are list-building under false pretenses. Swaying opinions will require a substantial number of signers whose opinions make a difference to those you are trying to influence. Presenting an official with a large list of their constituents who agree with your cause can be a powerful statement, especially if you do it in person.

So how do you implement an online petition? We asked eight nonprofit technology professionals what tools they would recommend.

Affordable Petition and eAdvocacy Options

There are a number of free and low-cost options which provide basic petition functionality. Most of these tools also provide online advocacy tools, which allow your constituents to directly email or fax officials.

• CitizenSpeak (www.citizenspeak.org).  CitizenSpeak offers free petition and online advocacy functionality that is easy to setup and requires no technical expertise.
• eAdvocacy from Action Studio (www.actionstudio.org). A richer set of online advocacy features than CitizenSpeak, for $49.99/month ($9.99/month for the first three months – faxes, and emails beyond the first 10,000, cost extra).  Requires a bit more technical expertise to setup, but has solid usability and documentation.
• Democracy in Action (www.democracyinaction.org).  DIA offers list management, petitions, website content management features, and surveys for $200 setup and $100/month.  Email blasting and online donations are available for additional fees.  The package is quite flexible and can be seamlessly integrated into a website, but you’ll need substantial HTML expertise to set it up.  Several contributors had concerns about their support and technical documentation.
• AMP, by Radical Designs (www.radicaldesigns.org).  AMP is a toolset for content management, petitions, and online advocacy, as well as a number of mobilization functionalities like organizing meetings and shared housing.   It is available as a free, open source tool, but you’ll need substantial technical expertise to install and integrate it.   Radical Designs will also integrate and host it for you for additional consulting fees. 

If your budget only runs to free software, it might also be worth a look at the many free online public petition sites, such as ThePetitionSite, PetitionsOnline.com or Petitions.org. We weren’t able to find people using the sites, but what we did hear made us nervous. Use these sites with care – make sure that you are able to export data about your supporters from the website, check if you will be charged for this export, and ensure that the site does not retain the right to email (i.e. spam) those who sign your petition.

Using What You Already Have

At their core, petitions are not a very complicated functionality. All you need is something that will allow users to enter their names and contact information, potentially let them opt in to hear more about your progress, and then store and report on this data. If you’re willing to get a bit technically creative, this functionality may be provided by a tool that you might already have.

• eNewsletter tools.  A number of email newsletter tools, such as Topica (www.topica.com) or PHP List (www.tincan.co.uk/phplist) could be setup by someone with some technical skills to meet all the basic petition needs.  This option would also give you the ability to email those supporters who opt to hear more. For more on email newsletter tools, see our A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools article.
• Content Management Systems.  Many content management systems, such as Drupal (www.drupal.org) or Plone (www.plone.org), allow you to create forms to collect information and then see the information that you have collected.  This could also meet basic petition needs.

Supporting a Robust eAdvocacy Strategy

Petitions functionality is offered by nearly all integrated online tools.  If you want to combine sophisticated petition campaigns with sophisticated email and online donation campaigns, and integrate it all into your website, consider CapWiz (www.capwiz.com) GetActive (www.getactive.com), Convio (www.convio.com), and Kintera (www.kintera.com).  These major tool providers can also provide best practices and expertise to help you chart your course. 

Thanks to Aspiration for their financial support of this article, as well as to the nonprofit technology professionals who provided recommendations, advice, and other help:

• Brett Bonfield, NPower Pennsylvania
• Jenny Council, NetCorps
• John Emerson, Backspace
• Michael Greenle, NPower Pennsylvania
• Eric Leland, Consultant Commons/ CompuMentor
• Greg Nelson, Independent Consultant
• Steve Perez, Working Families Party
• Jon Stahl, ONE/ Northwest
• Michael Stein, Internet Strategy Consultant

This article was edited by Idealware; any errors or omissions are Idealware’s sole responsibility.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike2.5 License

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