April 2008

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.

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I put this graph together for our eNews online seminar, summarizing how the monthly costs of a bulk email tool vary as your list size gets bigger. I expected there to be a difference, but I didn't realize it was going to be this pronounced - the list of tools on the right are in order of cheapest to more expensive for a very small list (250 people, who each get one email a month) - and there's a very substantial flip-flop as those tools that are cheap for small lists become some of the most expensive for big ones.

And this doesn't even account for the difference between tools that charge based on the number of emails, and those that charge based on the number of constituents in your list. This graph smooths over that difference by assuming you're sending everyone on your list one email a month.

So the moral: you really need to have a sense of how many emails per month you expect to send, and about how many people you expect to have on your list, both now and in the future, before it makes any sense to start comparing prices for bulk email tools.

Sue asks: We purchased Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge last year. People here love it, but most of our donations come through the mail. Only 46 online donations since Sept. 07, so I’m wondering if it makes sense to purchase their online donation module, which is quite expensive, or to do something less expensive. We are planning to use Monster Commerce (now owned by Network Solutions) for our new online store, and may just try to make that work for donations, too. I’m not sure how flexible it is, though. We’ve been using the Bizland shopping cart for both sales and donations, which makes donors feel like they are purchasing something when they make a donation, and we would like to improve that interface.

Laura Quinn of Idealware says:
The key issue here is integration - how important is it to you that your donations flow smoothly into Raisers Edge from your online donation module, without any manual work for your staff? At your volume - 5-10 donations per month - getting the data into Raiser Edge doesn't feel like enough of an effort to pay substantially more for Blackbaud's online transactions module. While this tool, called NetCommunity, offers some nice integrated features - for instance, the ability to change the giving levels on an online donation form based on a user's giving history - it doesn't seem like you're at a scale that it makes sense to pay a lot more for these advanced features. There are a number of tools that provide nice support for online donations for the realm of $20/month plus 3% per transaction - see our Online Donation report (it's quite old, but the list of tools is still reasonably useful)

You should be able to export the data from any online donation tool, to be able to import it into Raisers Edge every week, or at whatever frequency makes sense for you. Even manually entering the data seems like a reasonable process for your volume, although this becomes more error prone. Of course, you should think about the future as well - are you likely to continue getting donations at about the same pace, or is the number likely to increase over time to a volume that's less easily manageable with manual processes?

In regard to Monster Commerce, while it can be tempting to try to consolidate an online store and online donation options, my experience is that it's difficult to provide substantial support for both with a single tool. If you sell more than a handful of items, a real eCommerce tool is warranted - these provide a shopping cart model, tools to update pictures and prices, and support for shipping fees and sales tax. These more sophisticated tools generally are built for the business world, and have trouble supporting donations in a way that doesn't involve "checking out" and sometimes even "shipping" the donation. You might check out Click & Pledge - they have robust support for donations, and a shopping cart model for items, and might provide enough functionality for your needs. Or see our article A Few Good Payment Multitaskers for a number of different options that might you kind of get you there in a single package.

Or do any of our intrepid readers have suggestions for tools that will support both sophisticated eCommerce - a shopping cart and things like shipping fee rules for a store with a substantial number of items - as well as solid donation pages and processes?

Update 4/10: Ack! As David mentions below, and several people have emailed me, Blackbaud's NetCommunity is the wrong product for Sue's needs - their NetSolutions would be much more fitting. (I knew I should have sent this question to someone who works more extensively with Blackbaud products... I apologize for the misinformation. I assure you that our articles are better researched!) Could anyone give us a ballpark sense of what Sue would expect to pay for NetSolutions? At a lower price point than NetCommunity, it might be sensible to pay a little more for a solution which doesn't require staff time to get the donation data into Raiser's Edge.

The Ask Idealware posts take on some of the questions that you send us at ask@idealware.org. Have a great option to suggest for this question? Hate the response here? Help us out by entering your own answer as a comment below.