Change.org’s big network
Surprisingly enough the founder of Change.org had aims to go into investment banking and not social work. During Ben Rattray’s senior year of college, his older brother came out of as gay and voiced his concern that there were not enough people willing to “stand up or speak out” on social issues, leading to the Ben Rattray’s creation of Change.org. The website has since been a very successful online platform for creating and sharing petitions. There have been countless stories of its success ranging from rape reform in South Africa to vetoing a bill that would have ended the discussion of banning plastic for a few towns in Illinois.
The website’s immense success can be attributed to the slacktivism and the huge network of people the website can reach. Appealing to people’s sense of justice, users can share the petition through Facebook, email, and Twitter. If just one person shares this petition on Facebook than that is equivalent to presenting it to a person’s family, close friends, childhood friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and so on. The person who first started the successful petition will ultimately end up not being able to recognize the majority of the names listed. For example, the successful South African rape petition had the huge network of 170,000 nodes (signatures). The petition for continuing the discussion of plastic in Illinois even reached up to a network containing 150,000 nodes. It would be interesting to see if there were any or how many separate components exist in the network considering the sheer size. With the Internet the petition’s link can be spread around to a whole range of people who have no connection with any previous signers.
However, the network of signers is all connected by the fact that they care about this particular social issue. Rattray knew the power of having such a niche network that his business model consists of selling the emails of the people in these networks to non-profits with similar issues. As of 2012, Change.org earns a yearly income of $15 million. Along with networks of petition signers’, there is a network of similar causes. The whole website is made successful by maintaining and connecting more nodes to this network.