What to do after you start your petition?

So this blog will be all about petitions and starting petitions. The most important thing in this post that I want to cover is the promotion of your petitions. If you don't promote your petition correctly then it won't get any signatures and it will never have the impact that you want it to have. If you're going after a large company like WalMart or some other multi-billion dollar company you will need to gain massive signatures if you plan on them noticing you and your petition. With the influx of social news sites like digg and reddit, getting a petition seen by millions is much easier now than it was a few years ago. But digg and reddit will be of no help if your petition isn't in a niche that digg or reddit, typically technology, is interested in. Sometimes it can be a good idea to contact large news sites or blogs, the chances of them adding your petition to their site is slim but if they do, it will instantly be seen by millions of people. Stay tuned for more ideas on starting a petition!

Start your petition!

So you want to start a petition but you don't know where to start? I think we may be able to help you get your petition going.

The first thing you need to do is choose a petition site. There are literally hundreds of petition sites to choose form so you will have to find one that fits your needs the best. My personal favorite is PetitionSpot just because of their pretty design and easy to use UI. Although I must say, they have recently put some ad's on the site that are annoying me to no end. Anyway, wherever you decide to go with make sure it's good for you and the goal of your petition.

Next you need to write out your petition and make sure you cover all the important points of your petition. Be sure you don't leave anything out and make sure the grammar is correct. If your petition is poorly written then nobody will take it seriously. In order to get big time signatures and exposure, you're going to need to have well thought out text in your petition that covers all your bases. Many times, when financially possible, people will hire a professional writer to write the petition for them or at the very least double check the punctuation, grammar, and structure. There are lots of places to go for professional writers online, my personal favorites is DigitalPoint.

After your petition is written and posted online, you now need to start getting signatures, but how? You have to be creative and persistent. If your petition is about the NFL, then a good place to start is by posting your petition on football forums and message boards, see if you can get some help from others who share your viewpoints. If you can get people to help you spread the word you're going to have great success. Spreading the word and getting signatures on your own is going to be very hard and time consuming. But don't be discouraged, some of the biggest petition success stories started with one person and one webpage. Take the EA petition for example, it started with one angry gamer and ended with EA, a multi-billion dollar company, begging for mercy.

Good luck!

The EA petition

Has anyone seen the EA Petition? It's basically a petition that someone started telling EA to stop screwing it's customers out of money. EA had planned on charging money for guns in the new EA game Battlefield Bad Company. Course once gamers found out about this they hit the roof. This is a perfect example of how effective petitions are.

The EA petition got serious steam and it got it fast. Gamers were furious that EA was trying to take advantage of their loyalty. Soon the petition had so many signatures that EA had to cave in to the gamers demands. Whoever started this petition did a great thing!

Have you ever been sooooo mad about something?

Have you ever been so mad your blood was boiling? You wanted to make a difference but didn't know how? That's what petitions are for, so why not start one?

The first time I started a petition I was only 13 years old. I started it on pen and paper though, I hadn't discovered the internet at that point in my life. The petition I started was in reaction to the local baseball card shop announcing they would no longer be carrying comic books. Looking back I realize this was a silly petition because the store owner was clearly not making enough money to justify the space the comic area was taking up. In the end we landed almost 500 signatures which is a pretty large amount considering how old I was and the fact they were pen and paper signatures.

Later on in this blog I'll go over some other good petitions that I started. Thanks for reading!

My first post

I have created this blog because I want to bring attention to the importance of starting a petition.