Bryan Thomas for The New York Times “We aren’t in the business of optimizing and maximizing profits,” Mr. Rattray said. “We’re in the business of impact.”
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When Benjamin O’Keefe read the words of Abercrombie Fitch’s chief executive, Mike Jeffries, suggesting that the retailer wanted its clothes worn only by thin, attractive “cool kids,” he wasn’t happy. Mr. O’Keefe, 18, struggled with weight issues in middle and high school and felt compelled to speak out. He created a petition on the Web site Change.org, encouraging Mr. Jeffries to sell clothes to people of all sizes. That was on May 8; the petition has now attracted more than 75,000 signatures.
One of the people who heard about the petition was Greg Karber, a Los Angeles filmmaker. Five days after the petition went up, Mr. Karber posted a video about Mr. Jeffries’ comments on YouTube. On May 15, a vague apology appeared on Abercrombie Fitch’s Facebook page, and a week later, Mr. Jeffries met with Mr. O’Keefe. Afterward, the company issued a statement saying it would continue the dialogue and take “concrete steps” to support anti-bullying, diversity and inclusion.
This is just the kind of thing Ben Rattray says he was hoping for when he started Change.org in 2007. The idea behind it began percolating when he was a senior at Stanford in the late 1990s, studying economics and intent on a career in investment banking. While he was home for winter break, his brother, Nick, who was in high school at the time, told his family and friends he was gay. “Before he came out,” Mr. Rattray said, “Nick saw lots of homophobia and bullying, all these insulting comments made, but his friends didn’t stand up for the L.G.B.T. community, no one spoke out. And it was so painful for him, seeing people he loved not saying anything against all this hate.”
It was a pivotal moment for Ben. That conversation began his transformation, he said, from wanting to be in finance to wanting a career that revolved around social change, “enabling people to speak out for issues they care about.” He thought he would do that by studying public interest law at New York University — and then he saw Facebook. “I saw the potential power of that technology to connect people around issues of common interest,” he said.
Mr. Rattray ditched law school and wrote a 90-page business plan for Change.org and then introduced the site with a college friend, Mark Dimas. They wanted it to provide tools for social organizing and fund-raising and tried a number of approaches, including virtual political action committees, skills-based volunteerism, social fundraising and personal pledges. It turned out the simplest tool, the petition, worked best. “This merging of old-school advocacy with social media made the petition much more effective,” Mr. Rattray said.
Today, the company has 170 employees in 18 countries and is growing faster outside the United States than in it, with two million new international users each month. Last year, revenue was $15 million, which came from sponsored petitions, started and paid for by businesses and organizations. These are usually nonprofit, political and charitable organizations, although the site will accept sponsored petitions from any business or organization.
About a month ago, the site made promoted petitions available to its users worldwide. Promoted petitions allow individuals to pay to get a petition in front of Change.org’s 38 million users. The more a signer pays, the greater the number of users who will see the petition. For example, it costs $10 to promote a petition to 50 users, $100 for 500 users. The average contribution is about $19, and there is a $1,000 cap. Mr. Rattray projects that by year’s end, 10 percent of Change.org’s revenue will come from promoted petitions.
Last month, Change.org also secured a $15 million round of investment led by the philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network. Mr. Rattray has declined to take traditional venture capital because there are few venture capitalists willing to accept his terms: he says he will never sell the company, go public or cede control. “We aren’t in the business of optimizing and maximizing profits,” he said. “We’re in the business of impact.”
The company has been certified as a B Corporation by the nonprofit B Lab, a certification available to for-profit companies that pass B Lab’s B Impact Assessment, which shows a company meets certain standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. Mr. Rattray says he would ultimately like to incorporate as a benefit corporation, which is a legal status akin to a C corporation, S corporation or L.L.C. He can’t do so because Change.org is incorporated in Delaware and that state has yet to pass legislation to allow companies to incorporate as benefit corporations. “We operate as if we were incorporated that way anyway,” Mr. Rattray said. “We respect the interests not just of shareholders but of stakeholders too.”
Those stakeholders include people like Mr. O’Keefe, the Abercrombie Fitch petitioner, and Bo Muller-Moore, a folk artist in Montpelier, Vt. Mr. Muller-Moore’s T-shirt company sells custom-designed, hand-printed T-shirts bearing the slogan “Eat More Kale.” In 2011, when Mr. Muller-Moore decided to register the slogan for a federal trademark, the fast food chain Chick-fil-A opposed him, maintaining it was too similar to its “Eat mor chikin” slogan. (Chick-fil-A declined to comment for this post).
In September, a friend of Mr. Muller-Moore’s started a petition against Chick-fil-A on Change.org. Today the petition has 41,000 signatures and has garnered press attention and support from Vermont’s governor, Peter Shumlin. Although Chick-fil-A has not stopped its efforts to block Mr. Muller-Moore’s trademark, the petition has been a boon for his business — after an Associated Press article appeared about the petition and was picked up by Yahoo, the Eat More Kale site went from 350 visitors a day to 27,500 visitors and stayed that way for three weeks.
Mr. Rattray says he wants to enable Change.org’s users to develop ongoing campaigns that have the power to shift public policy and corporate behavior over time. “The question is: How do we turn these remarkable, momentary victories into longer-term social movements?” he said. “We are focused on building tools to enable that.”
You can follow Eilene Zimmerman on Twitter.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/change-org-merges-old-school-advocacy-with-social-media/?partner=rss&emc=rss