A Few Good Online Petition Tools

Looking to win friends and influence people? When used as part of a larger strategy, online petitions can be useful in doing both.

Petitions with strong support can circulate beyond your current circle as supporters forward them to their friends. Thus, they can be useful in building a list of people interested in your cause. With a comprehensive follow-up strategy — informing those who have opted in about progress and asking them to take further steps — some of the signers can often be converted into activists or donors.

It's important to make sure that the signatures will help in actually influencing the opinion of public officials or companies or you are list-building under false pretenses. Swaying opinions will require a substantial number of signers whose opinions make a difference to those you are trying to influence. Presenting an official with a large list of their constituents who agree with your cause can be a powerful statement, especially if you do it in person.

So how do you implement an online petition? We asked eight nonprofit technology professionals what tools they would recommend.

Affordable Petition and eAdvocacy Options

There are a number of free and low-cost options that provide basic petition functionality. Most of these tools also provide online advocacy tools, which allow your constituents to directly email or fax officials.

CitizenSpeak

CitizenSpeak offers free petition and online advocacy functionality that is easy to set up and requires no technical expertise.

eAdvocacy from Action Studio

A richer set of online advocacy features than CitizenSpeak, for $49.99 a month ($9.99 a month for the first three months — faxes, and emails beyond the first 10,000, cost extra). Requires a bit more technical expertise to set up, but has solid usability and documentation.

Democracy in Action

DIA offers list management, petitions, Web site content-management features, and surveys for $200 setup and $100 a month. Email blasting and online donations are available for additional fees. The package is quite flexible and can be seamlessly integrated into a Web site, but you'll need substantial HTML expertise to set it up. Several contributors had concerns about its support and technical documentation.

AMP, by Radical Designs

AMP is a tool set for content management, petitions, and online advocacy, as well as a number of mobilization functionalities like organizing meetings and shared housing. It is available as a free, open-source tool, but you'll need substantial technical expertise to install and integrate it. Radical Designs will also integrate and host it for you for additional consulting fees.

If your budget only runs to free software, it might also be worth a look at the many free online public petition sites, such as ThePetitionSite, PetitionsOnline.com, or Petitions.org. We weren't able to find people using the sites, but what we did hear made us nervous. Use these sites with care — make sure that you are able to export data about your supporters from the Web site, check if you will be charged for this export, and ensure that the site does not retain the right to email (in other words, spam) those who sign your petition.

Using What You Already Have

At their core, petitions are not a very complicated functionality. All you need is something that will allow users to enter their names and contact information, potentially let them opt in to hear more about your progress, and then store and report on this data. If you're willing to get a bit technically creative, this functionality may be provided by a tool that you might already have.

• eNewsletter tools. A number of email newsletter tools, such as Topica or PHP List could be set up by someone with some technical skills to meet all the basic petition needs. This option would also give you the ability to email those supporters who opt to hear more. (For more on email newsletter tools, see Idealware's A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools article.)
• Content Management Systems. Many content-management systems, such as Drupal or Plone, allow you to create forms to collect information and then see the information that you have collected. This could also meet basic petition needs.

Supporting a Robust eAdvocacy Strategy

Petitions functionality is offered by nearly all integrated online tools. If you want to combine sophisticated petition campaigns with sophisticated email and online donation campaigns, and integrate it all into your Web site, consider CapWiz, GetActive, Convio, and Kintera. These major tool providers can also provide best practices and expertise to help you chart your course.