In the last 5 years I have started dozens of petitions. Some of them have been successful and some of them haven’t been. Here’s how to make your petition go viral.
Here’s a quick overview of my most successful petitions (in terms of number of signatures) so you can check out my ‘credibility’ to write this article. I thought it would be good to write about why I think some of them worked and some of them didn’t.
My newest petition is here. I’d really appreciate it if you could sign that first and share it a few times. In fact the the main reason I am writing this whole guide in the first place is to increase exposure to my latest petition, which is already going viral as I write this. I want to wipe that smug grin off of Hiroyuki Terada’s face! (it actually makes me really fucking ANGRY that YouTube has banned me of all people and yet that sicko remains… while earning plenty from animals suffering…)
Anyway, now that I’ve got that out of the way, here are my best tips and recommendations to grow your own petition(s):
So, what can you do to make your petition more successful? What can you do? What not to do?
- The first piece of advice I have is to make the petition itself very specific. Target one problem at a time. The world will not miraculously become a better place all because of one single petition. It doesn’t work that way. So be patient and only make one petition at a time. Petitions like “Everyone go vegan!” are doomed to fail from the very start. For example don’t start a petition “Stop 91 new coal mines from being built in Australia!” (yes I really did that). What did I learn from it? A petition is not a news story. I would have been better to write an article about it instead: “91 new coal mines are being built in Australia!” and send that to Mongabay.
- Likewise, make the target of the petition very specific. Don’t be vague and just target a whole organisation (or worse, nobody). Find out who the CEO is. Target them. Find out who the shareholders are. Be smart about it! :)
- Choose a powerful image. You only get one shot at this so you need to get it right. Make sure the picture is clear and in focus. Make sure the colour balance is right. Spend some time selecting something that looks interesting. Juxtaposition is good. For example I am sure the fat hunter shown in this petition helped it to gain momentum. You really want to show the animals’ plight. Unfortunately that’s the way it is. No one is going to click on a petition of a rainbow. A lot of people browse for petitions and it just won’t get the same attention as another one that highlights some gross injustice out there.
- Write more than just one paragraph. Tell a bit of a story about why it’s so important to you. More words are good, because they help search engines to index your petition.
- You might think the total number of signatures is the most important metric, but it’s not. It’s the rate of people signing. People like it when they can see petitions gathering momentum and growing exponentially. When a petition just sits there idle, it’s no good to anyone, no matter how many signatures it has. So therefore aim to increase the rate of people who are signing per day, per hour, and ultimately per minute. When this happens –when people start signing once every few minutes– the petition will start to gather its own momentum! The more you can share the petition during this active phase, the better. So that’s the best time to drive people to the petition — when it’s already active.
- The best way to increase the rate of signatures is to share it not once, not twice, but literally hundreds of times. Don’t just post the petition to your social media feed once and forget about it. Like anything else, you have to work much harder than that in order to get what you want. Post it several times throughout the day all throughout the first week. What’s more important to you? How/what you think others will think about you for re-sharing your petition a lot? Or the petitions themselves? Hopefully it’s the latter. Remember that not all of your followers are following you 24/7. They’ll naturally miss things that you share. So share it until you get sick of sharing it. That’s how much you should be sharing it. But there’s no point in oversharing things and completely saturating your own feed if you only have 5 friends. Right?
- Share it where it matters. Don’t just share it on your own social media accounts. Post your petition in comments. You may not be aware of this but I was recently banned from LinkedIn. I had 15k followers. It was good while it lasted. Even so, I have still managed to get people to sign this new petition of mine. How? By posting the links on other people’s social media (like instagram). Don’t just post it ad hoc randomly anywhere. Discriminate! Post links to animal rights petitions to organisations like PETA for example. Don’t be posting them in the wrong places. It’s easy to search for new YouTube channels and new Instagram accounts. Find them!
- Rather than try to do this all year round, better to put all of your effort into a one or a two week period. That’ll give the petition its best chance of success. Work on it for a week or two. Sometimes petitions will become active again after some time doing nothing. Those are good opportunities to re-share it. When it plateaus again naturally –and it will– then stop.
- Just to reiterate, work on the petition when it is active, not when it’s passive. You’ll know when it’s active because the rate of signatures will be going up, not down.
- Use imperative commands and drive people to act on your petition. Often it’s not the petition itself that does anything, sitting there on its own, it’s the tens of thousands of social justice warriors who are ready and willing to basically try to ‘shame’ people into some kind of ‘submission’, leaving bad reviews and so on. You know, the keyboard warriors! What can I say? It’s a reactionary form of bullying in a way. Now I happen to think that animal cruelty is worse than a mild amount of name-calling, so quite frankly I don’t care even if it is seen to be “bullying”. It’s for a good cause. “Won’t somebody please think of the crustaceans?!” So my suggestion is to use your signatories to the best of your ability. Think of them like a little army — and you are their commander. Now it’s time to battle!If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that in a way everyone wants to be/appear ‘cool’ and “liked”. While everyone might not like or want to be a celebrity or be seen in the spotlight of the world’s attention –because they are too shy or introverted or whatever– everyone secretly wants to be “popular” in terms of their approval rating, as seen by others (even though they might not admit it). Nobody really likes not being liked. Even people who are “different” and don’t follow mainstream trends like/want to be liked. Right? It’s human nature. And like it or not, we are a social species. Often people are genuinely worried about what others think of them. Sometimes it’s literally their job that is at stake. Or their business. So for example you can sometimes use your signatories to put group pressure onto someone. This doesn’t always work, because some people don’t care even if one hundred thousand people think they’re a total arsehole, but it’s worth a try. The best time to do this is when people are outraged at what they are witnessing… this approach usually works best when you can overwhelm someone’s social media account or google rating or whatever.
- Last but not least, try to update your followers, especially if you have had some kind of moderate success. It’s the polite thing to do.
- If you didn’t read the intro, I just wanted to say that the main reason I am writing this whole guide in the first place is to increase exposure to my latest petition. Please sign and share that in as many places as you can think of. I can’t get it to one million signatures on my own.
If you’re still reading, you can go and sign my other petition on change.org: “Stop Hiroyuki Terada abusing crustaceans and amphibians on YouTube“ (yeah I thought I’d create not one but TWO petitions!)
Thanks & good luck!
Leslie
