Change.org thrust into spotlight in wake of Trayvon Martin case

The online campaign platform is growing at breakneck pace as petition success proves its ability to impact real world change

When George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder for the shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, it was heralded as a landmark in the struggle for racial justice across America.

But for one man, sitting a thousand miles away in New York, the true significance of the event was far greater even than that. Ben Rattray sums up the lessons of the Trayvon Martin story in one bold statement: "It's no longer the case that you are powerless."

Rattray is the 32-year-old founder of change.org, the online campaigning platform on which Martin's parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, launched their petition calling for Zimmerman to be prosecuted.

They took the move almost two weeks after their son had been followed and then shot by the self-appointed neighbourhood watch leader, during which their appeals for judicial action had been met with resounding official indifference.

The petition went global, attracting 2.2m signatures and sparking rallies, marches and blanket media coverage. Rattray sees that as evidence of a fundamental shift that is being forced by the advent of online and mobile technology coupled with the individual passion of individuals like Trayvon Martin's parents.

"Five or 10 years ago, the Trayvon story would have remained a private injustice. But through the capacity to start a campaign, and social media's ability to spread the word, it became a national sensation."

Crucially, he says, Trayvon Martin has revealed the power and the influence that individuals can now wield to expose once-hidden wrongs. "It was the personal connection people felt with Trayvon's parents that made it resonate with the vast majority of Americans," he says.

Rattray is speaking in change.org's new offices in downtown Manhattan. The New York team has only just moved into the premises, which are still half-empty and powdered with builder's dust.

But the space is filling up fast. Even in the mercurial world of digital media, change.org has blast its way into the public consciousness with explosive speed.

The site has existed since 2007, but its current iteration – a platform for collective action focused around online petitions – was only launched 15 months ago.

By every index, the operation is spreading like wildfire. Every month it adds one million new users and hosts 15,000 new petitions. Its staff has quintupled in under a year. It will soon be operating in 20 countries.

If the website had done nothing else beyond facilitating the Trayvon Martin campaign it would have staked its place firmly in American public discourse. But Trayvon Martin is just the most visible manifestation of change.org's activities.

Most of its work goes utterly unnoticed on the national stage – hundreds of thousands of hyper-local campaigns that never break out from the immediate neighbourhood. But its ability to shape the national conversation is also increasingly evident.

Take some of the most widely discussed topics of recent weeks that all bear the change.org imprint: "Pink slime", the beef-based filler added to school meals that Bettina Seigel, a Texas mother petitioned against, gaining 250,000 signatures in two weeks and forcing food producers to suspend manufacture and the US department of agriculture to ammend its purchasing policy.

Or Bank of America, cajoled into dropping a new $5 per month banking fee to which a 22-year-old nanny, Molly Katchpole, objected. Her protest petition garnered 300,000 signatures and inspired others to follow suit in challenging hidden bank charges.

Or the debate on bullying sparked by Katy Butler, 17, herself a victim at school. She pushed the Motion Picture Association of America to drop the PG-13 rating from the documentary film Bully after 500,000 signed her petition calling for the movie to be given the widest exposure possible.

The striking thing about Rattray's engagement with such ground-moving social innovation is how close it came to never happening. The new change.org office is just a few blocks away from Wall Street, and for most of his youth that is where Rattray hoped to end up.

"As a kid I wanted to walk down Wall Street, wearing a double-breasted suit – it was the 80s - and make a tonne of money which I saw as the measure of success. I would retire at age 35 and then get into politics."

He came from a comfortable middle-class family, growing up in Santa Barbara, America's Riviera. He was sporty and handsome, a homecoming king.

How a preppy kid from California with dreams of a Wall Street fortune got to become a leading figure in social media activism is one of several unlikely features of change.org. His explanation for the leap is that he had an epiphany when he was in his last year of Stanford, when one of his younger brothers came out as gay. "What struck me most was his description of the pain he felt not at the hands of actively homophobic people, but because of those people who stood by and did nothing. And I was one of them. It made me ashamed."

Shame, and the self-questioning that came in its wake, led Rattray to change the course of his life, he says, from the pursuit of riches to the pursuit of effective collective action. He applied to study public law at New York University, but then equally rapidly dropped out of that when he had a second epiphany in 2005.

This one was courtesy of Facebook, which had launched a year earlier. Rattray had a sudden vision – that the power of Facebook to connect people in a social network could be harnessed for social change.

"It became a compulsion for me, to build this vision."

He set up change.org in 2007, working out of his home in San Francisco, with initially only limited results. The first three and a half years were, he says, a sacrifice and a flop. "There was a massive amount of failure."

The first iteration of the site was as a social network for non-profit groups. Imagine Facebook connecting not friends and relatives but Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty.

It was, he now sees, too abstract, too indirect, too above people's life experiences. "It was wholly ineffective. People weren't coming back to the site, and there wasn't much change happening."

Nine months in Rattray came close to despairing. He was so close to bankruptcy that he had to borrow his little brother Tyler's life savings to keep the business afloat.

"That's when I realised this might not work. In that one week, I had a sense of hopelessness. But only on that one occasion – it's never happened again."

He doubled down, he says, and worked twice as hard to remodel the website. He shifted it away from networking groups towards blogging, hosting a team of writers campaigning on specialist issues such as climate change or women's rights.

It was moderately more successful than the first attempt, and may have stumbled along for a while. But then Rattray started to notice a strange thing: the petitions that some bloggers used to supplement their campaigns began taking off, and soon became far more impactful than the blogs themselves.

The tipping point was a petition launched from an internet cafe in Cape Town by an unknown black lesbian South African called Ndumie Funda. She decided to fight against so-called "corrective" rape – the violation of lesbians to turn them straight. Her petition went viral, attracting 171,000 supporters across 175 countries and prompting the South African parliament to set up a national task force to end the practice.

"That was a shock for me," Rattray says. "There was almost no person on Earth with less power than this woman. A poor black lesbian woman in South Africa who had herself been raped. She launched the largest advocacy campaign online South Africa had ever seen – it was incredible."

Rattray saw Funda's victory as an unequivocal demonstration of internet-fueled people power. On the back of it, he changed tack once again, reconfiguring change.org from a blogging site to an organising platform for people's campaigns and petitions.

That was in January 2011. The rest is history.

His conviction in the potential of online people power has grown with every month. He believes that it has the ability not just to right individual cases of injustice, such as Trayvon Martin's, but to transform whole political and business worlds.

"If public figures know that there's a spotlight on them, they behave differently. They are embarrassed by their behaviour, and they change. Look at Trayvon Martin – prosecutors all across America now know that they can no longer operate in obscurity."

Contributor

Ed Pilkington in New York

The GuardianTramp

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