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Comment by bpizzi | Hacker News Reader

Two things: build the form and collect the data. Now that I think about it, it's a "surveymonkey" disguised in "change.org", actually.

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Wife runs a not-for-profit. This is brilliant. My perception is that petitions don't often accomplish their stated goals, but what if the side benefits of gauging interest, drawing light first-step commitments, and collecting contact information accrued to your org instead of an activism-feelings-aggregator like change.org?

That may come off as cynical to people, but as a petition-signer, I'd rather get followed up a couple times by an organization actually working on something I care about (and given a path to act a little more on my caring, even if it's 'come to this event' or 'give us money') than followed up indefinitely by change.org, who cannot seem to guess well at all what sort of petitions I'd like to support.

So your wife's use case would be : she would create a petition, her users would sign it, then she would download their contact details, correct? What happens to the petition itself? Is there any action on it?

Hey, I see what you're on, don't steal my prospect :D (joking ;))

Just as much happens to it as usually happens to a petition. If you get enough signatures, you present it to whomever you think should care: government body or local news or whatever. There’s even a chance that they actually care and it makes a modest difference in some legislator’s deliberation or generates some publicity about the issue.

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