Starting a Petition can build a movement

What is the change you want to make in the world?

A petition is a great tactic for pressing for change on an issue that you care about. You can use it to find others who care about the issue too, and invite them to take action with you, and then demonstrate to your target that there is popular support for them to act. Popular petition site Change.org claims an impressive impact of more than 30,000 victories from petitions alone.

As we see it though, a petition itself sometimes isn’t the end result but just the beginning. Building your petition can be an important step towards building a people-powered movement for change that can have a much larger impact. Before being able to organize people to make a change in more complex ways, a petition is an excellent low-bar entry for people to affirm that they are behind your cause.

By using the Ignite theme, and collecting signers emails in the people database of NationBuilder, you will be able to keep in contact with the people who sign your petition to share updates about the issue and progress towards your goal. (Unlike some petition sites on NationBuilder you own all the data you collect so its yours to use). But even more important, you can invite them to take further actions. These could be online actions, such as sharing content in social networks or making an online donation to the cause, or offline actions like attending or organizing events in their local communities. As the theme microsite is built on NationBuilder you will be set up to scale up your movement soon to the next step with all the larger NationBuilder tools. (While additional page templates for further actions are not included in the Ignite theme, once you’ve built momentum with a successful petition you can use another theme for a full website or work with a NationBuilder architect like Tectonica to help you grow your movement).  

The petition is just the beginning…