Can change.org ever really change?

Change.org is a petition site, set up in the standard issue Silicon Valley tech company mould and run as such until a few weeks ago. 

Its mission is ostensibly to empower large amounts of people to take action on issues they care about and ideally help people along their journeys to being activists and leaders by being an easy entry point. I never really bought into that fully because at the end of the day this was a company, taking VC funding, reporting to shareholders and prioritising growth. The way it was established, the way it was run meant that it was engaging in social change as a side effect, not as core business.

Here’s my largely spectator view on the journey so far. 

Change.org exploded onto the NGO scene and my consciousness with three bold propositions. One was selling email addresses, just as many traditional NGOs were spending energy trying to grow their subscriber bases. Change would host many petitions, mostly junk with little relevance and package the signers up as “Australian” or “interested in the environment” and sell those lists. In my experience 99/100 petitions started by a civilian go nowhere, but that one outlier goes absolutely ballistic. Many established organisations that were a bit contemptuous of the change.org model still fessed up and bought those lists as a shortcut to building a supporter base they didn’t know how to grow or didn’t have the patience to cultivate slowly. 

The second was paying outrageous salaries. I’m saying… outrageous. Tech salaries for people from the not-profit sector. Especially in the US where I was living years ago, change.org would pay tens of thousands over market rate for relatively junior roles, which had the effect of draining talent from other organisations, paying people in our sector decent salaries (yay) and making the rest of us insanely jealous. 

The third was hosting petitions on basically anything. The platform wasn’t progressive, it wasn’t anti-racist, just about anything could stay up, gathering signatures, building campaigns. It’s the YouTube of petitions, a platform. And as such, it could do a better job of moderating its content. This put company policy at odds with most of its staff. 

Then it came crashing down, it almost went under. When change.org made the decision to stop selling email addresses in bulk they needed to find an alternate funding model to keep them afloat. They sacked so many people. It was horrible, even for the self righteous bystanders.

It took them a while with a much reduced staff but they did find a model that paid the bills: asking petition signers to chip in to share the petition to more people. Its ostensibly for advertising but these contributions fund the company. They built up their staff again. They invested in their platform to a degree unheard of in NGOs who tend to see tech as an expensive distraction and pain in the arse. The change.org petition platform is approximately 7,000 times better than its closest competitor. But this was a trade off; investing in an expensive product team and fleet of developers over campaign staff. Again, it points to the soul of the business being a platform, rather than for social good.

Then George Floyd was killed by a police officer triggering an unparalleled moment of reckoning on race across the world. I wonder if I’ll ever live through anything like that again. A petition for justice for George Floyd on change.org grew to an unspeakable size, 6, 10, 19 million signatures. A petition for justice for Breonna Taylor reached 11 million signatures. And after each of those people signed they were asked to chip in to grow that petition, aka to fund change.org. There was genuine confusion where signers thought they were contributing to the families, not the company. 

Ex-staff signed a public open letter asking change to turn the fundraising pitch off these petitions and get real in supporting racial justice. I am not going to speculate on what the debate internally would have been like. Again, I think skirting the boundaries of being a tech company building a platform used for social justice reasons, ostensibly supporting social justice campaigns is always going to be a tension, this was just an incredibly stark example in an incredibly heated moment.

In April this year Change.org announced it was giving all of the donations from the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor petitions to black-run initiatives, like the Black Lives Matter organisation. They say in this video that the commitment to racial justice is forever, internally and externally.

September 2021; Change is now a not for profit. What do I make of it? I think it’s the right move. A platform this good (and the ability to contact a truly eye watering number of people) should be driven by principle. The governance mechanisms meeting the aims of the company makes obvious sense.  

But I have my reservations. Can racists and anti-abortion activists still gather petition signatures, email them, grow their cause? Probably, there hasn’t been any editorial changes as far as I am aware. It’s still better “business” to host both sides of every issue, gaining more eyeballs and more email addresses. And that’s fine, but that makes it a not-for-profit platform, not an impact driven organisation.

The media release detailing the change in governance was also very heavy on various billionaire backers, which I understand for governance reasons, as they were asked to give up their part of the company to a foundation. But it sends the message of benevolent backers allowing it to happen rather than being baked into the core of the organisation. Centering the voices of billionaires when announcing a not-for-profit model … that’s certainly one way of going about it.

At the end of the day this company/foundation/platform was founded in Silicon Valley and it shows. Those are the bricks it was built with. It’s never really been driven by values or a need to create impact in the world. Whether it’s willing, financially able or committed to narrowing its mission seems highly unlikely to me.