Ask Idealware: International Petition Sites

Jill asks: Can anyone tell me about the following petition resources? Have you used them? How well do they work? Are they free for nonprofits? Which petition sites work best internationally? Or, by necessity, are there separate sites for each country? Which petition sites have the best "population" in terms of their site providing additional visibility for your petition among their audience? I'm particularly interested in:

• thepetitionsite.com
• ipetitions.com
• pledgebank.com
• petitions.pm.gov.uk
• hearfromyourmp.com
• netaction.org

Alan Rosenblatt, with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and author of the DrDigipol blog, responds:

Here is what I know about these:

• Thepetitionsite.com is owned by Care2.com. It is free to use and anyone can create a petition, drive traffic to it and download the signatures (but not email addresses) to forward to campaign target. For a fee, Care2 will create the petition for a campaign and drive its members to it. For a fee of about $2.25 or so per activist email acquired, Care2 will deliver validated, de-duplicated, opt-in email addresses to a non-profit. Typically, the minimum buy is $5000 and Care2 promotes the petition to its community of 8.8 million progressive activists. Additionally, Care2 will deliver the signatures to congressional offices or any other target of the campaign. Activists can also include a personalized comment attached to their signature to increase its influence potential.

My own experience with Care2 recruits is that they are super-activists. Compared to my activists acquired through other means, activists acquired from Care2 via thepetitionsite.com are 3.5 to 4 times more likely to take an action I ask them to than my other activists.

This site can also be used internationally for free and with limited use for email acquisition as around 2 million of Care2 activists are outside the US.

• Pledgebank.com was created by UK's MySociety.org with government money. It is inherently international and free to use by anyone. It is not a conventional petition site, but rather a peer pressure campaign tool. Anyone can set up a challenge to recruit others to participate in any call to action and promote it out to their lists or via advertising/word of mouth/etc. No one is obligated to fulfill a pledge until the target number of pledges have been attained.

• Petitions.pm.gov.uk is another MySociety tool specifically targeted at petitioning the British PM.

• hearfromyourmp.com is yet another MySociety tool that uses accumulating constituent pressure to cajole MPs to engage in an online discussion. It is particular to the UK.
  

The Ask Idealware posts take on some of the questions that you send us at ask@idealware.org. Are you familiar with these petition sites, or other great option for international petitions? Help us out by entering your own answer as a comment below.