Getting to change

A redesign of Change.org

There’s been a wave of self-organized movements in the past year (including the largest single day protest in U.S. history ). While Change.org has played a large role in many of these, their petitions have also, in some cases, been criticized as doing more for awareness than the concrete change their name implies. I’ve never been much of an activist myself and have been sitting on the sidelines for many of the recent political events. I decided to use a redesign as an opportunity to understand how social movements work and what could be done to make them move better.

Change.org! An awesome platform that seemed to be well positioned to help people make bigger changes.

How Change.org works and makes money

Change.org is a for-profit social change platform that allows people to support causes they believe in. Support primarily happens in two ways; creating petitions or signing them. The for-profit company makes money through sponsored petitions that pop up after for signers after they’ve finished signing a petition. After talking with people close to the product, I hypothesized that Change.org could bridge the gap between awareness and action in a way that would also allow Change.org to serve their own larger mission.

Where to start?

My first step in tackling this problem was to understand who is involved. I identified three primary stakeholders; people that create petitions(organizers), people that sign petitions(joiners), and the people that were being asked to make the change a petition is pushing for(decision makers). I decided to focus on organizers and joiners because they were the two groups that I could talk with directly.

I also listed out my initial assumptions and alternative tools that organizers and joiners have at their disposal to inact change.

What is Change.org competing with? Who are the people involved? A brain-dump helped me get started.

From research questions to conversations

I used these initial assumptions to create a list of research questions. This list helped me develop a short interview guide for each group of stakeholders.

A quick, 20 minute interview guide session helped me frame up the project better than I would have otherwise.

My interview guides prepared me to do some light contextual inquiry with friends, family, and people that had just come off of the womens’ march.

Take-aways and insights

I found out stuff! No for real, I had some big realizations about the gap between how petitions and movements work that made me question how online activism works.

1. There are different levels of activism in a movement and they’re not all reflected in online petitions

In tools such as Change.org, there’s an unnatural gap between making a signature and organizing a petition of your own.

“A supporter is different than a marcher which is different than an organizer.” — Political Organizer

2. Organizers have a hard time getting their participants involved beyond just signing

People that sign a petition often form the base for a movement that an organizer is organizing. Not giving petition signers easy next steps can keep a movement from growing.

“After our campaign grew, we couldn’t connect with all the people that signed the petition. To really [make the change we wanted to make], we needed people to actually write letters and we couldn’t pull that off.” — Organizer

3. Potential signers are often unconvinced that what they’re doing will lead to significant change

Many people that would otherwise be vocal about their views don’t sign online petitions because they view them as a form of slacktivism.

“How is signing a Change.org petition any more effective than retweeting an interesting article? What am I actually doing here?” — Petition signer

Analyzing the current experience

I used these insights to analyze the current Change.org UX flow from the perspective of these users

Change.org seemed to have issues helping people find steps to take that matched their level of interest.

Approach

I realized that, despite my previous beliefs, both organizers and joiners felt like they weren’t really making any impact through petitioning. I decided to focus on helping both groups reach the point where they knew they were making an impact and that I could make this happen using two tactics:

1. Better, fewer petitions
   Push petition creators to help each other build great petitions together.
2. Actionable next steps at all levels
   Get organizers to setup petitions in a way that allows signers to easily take next steps and reward signers for taking these next steps.

Ideation and user experience mapping

From here, I started mapping out what the initial experience could look like.

A redesigned flow could focus on connecting people around a movement and helping them create and find next steps.

I defined 3 sections of the app that would support the three tactics I would use; finding petitions, taking action on them, and building a sense of identity.

An updated app’s three primary orientations.

What if petitions were designed to be explored by area of interest?

What if starting a petition was secondary to supporting a petition?

What if you were celebrated for activities outside of just signing?

Finding out how wrong I was

After realizing how many assumptions I was wrong about during my first round of research, I decided to create a quick Invision prototype that I could use to get feedback from organizers and joiners.

Illustrating the concept

I used the feedback that I received to create more deliberate wireframes and mocks that could better illustrate the concept.

Petition authoring as an opportunity for collaboration

Because so much of the success of a petition relies on how it is made, I first laid the foundation of the experience for organizers. My biggest goal was to help organizers find missed opportunities to support each other and give their followers additional ways to support their cause.

A less intimidating petition creation flow could help you find other related petitions.

What if you could get help from more experienced petition creators and then create steps for others to follow?

Celebrating the signing

In order for signers to know they were making an impact, I created ways for them to immediately make committments to next steps and feel like they were becoming part of a larger movement

Signing petitions could be framed as joining a movement where you can commit to taking steps.

My riskiest assumptions

By this point, I was able to identify the biggest bets that this concept hinges on. These are areas that are worth questioning with alternatives:

• Using badging to incentivize alternative methods of participation. If not developed with sensitivity to the causes that people are supporting, systems like badges can appear insincere. Are there alternative systems for getting joiners and organizers more involved?
• Relying on machine intelligence to avoid duplication. Are there alternative ways to get people to find other petitions with similar ideas and be excited about it when they do?
• Being able to continue to promote Change.org’s sponsorship model.Change.org makes money through sponsors’ petitions that you see after signing a petition. Because this solution adds alternative activities after petition signing that may compete with signing another petition, it is worth running a test to see if Change.org’s business model would be effected.

Next Steps

From here, I would love to develop a deeper understanding of the different groups of people engaged in activism. Afterwards, the more pragmatic version of me would explore alternative approaches to solving this problem and find ways to test my riskiest assumptions in the cheapest ways possible.

Thanks for taking a read and I’d love to hear your thoughts!