Growing up in a conservative Santa Barbara home, Ben Rattray, '02, imagined he'd be a financier. He'd rake in millions on Wall Street, a powerful figure, dapper in double-breasted suits.
At 32, he's making his fortune—but in a way that seems diametrically different from his initial goal. Rattray founded Change.org, a San Francisco-based company that drives social activism with online petitions. Earlier this year Time magazine named him as one of its 100 Most Influential People in the World.
His firm offers "the power of enabling anyone to start their own campaign around a very specific issue and creating disruptive change,'' says Rattray, who started the company in 2007 with computer scientist Mark Dimas, '02, MS '03.
With 15,000 petitions started each month, the company says it has 15 million users who have tried to have an impact on issues ranging from economic and criminal justice, to education and environmental efforts, to gay and women's rights. The company says in 2011 its members—whose ranks are growing by nearly 2 million a month—recorded 800 victories. (A "win" is declared whenever the person who starts a petition reports that its goal has been met.) One of the company's biggest splashes occurred last fall. Bank of America had responded to increased regulation of credit cards by announcing that it would start charging debit card users $5 a month. An outraged twentysomething started a Change.org petition to fight the fee. Some 300,000 others signed. Bank of America, motivated by the negative press and traditional customer complaints, caved.
"Petitions," Rattray says, "are the oldest social tool in the book, but they've rarely been viewed as effective," often because they targeted the wrong people or couldn't build momentum. Paired with social networks on places like Facebook or Twitter, Change.org petitions can take off quickly and attract the attention of decision makers.
For example, Matt Muller, a San Francisco immigration attorney, had run out of court options to stop the deportation of sexual abuse survivor Blanca Medina. More than 118,000 people signed his Change.org petition or made calls to Immigration and Customs Enforcement days before Medina's deportation deadline. In June, Medina was granted a last-minute stay and her case will be reopened. "This would never have happened without the petition," Muller wrote to Change.org.
Online petitioning has some skeptics, who consider this trend lowest-common-denominator activism. They argue that "slacktivism" or "digital evangelism" does not win in the absence of public pressure from other sources, including traditional protests and conventional media attention. Rattray responds that the goal of mobilization "isn't for it to be difficult" but "for it to be effective, and by this measure 'slacktivism' has had some remarkable recent success."
While the website is free for users, Change.org makes money—$15 million in the past fiscal year—by sponsoring some petitions for clients. More than 200 groups, mostly nonprofits, including Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam and the Sierra Club, have paid for petition campaigns—with their gain being access to users they can contact to further their causes.
Save The Bay is a paying client that has twice asked Change.org users to urge Cargill Salt and its partners to not develop 1,400 acres of salt ponds in Redwood City. Its first campaign attracted 2,700 signatures. David Lewis, the group's executive director, says those signers took hundreds of additional actions on behalf of Save The Bay and donated almost $5,000. He declined to say what his group has paid Change.org for its petition, but he considers the investment "cost-effective."
Looking forward to the November elections, Change.org staffers say one hot topic is a request to have some female moderators at the 2012 presidential debates. They also expect to see petitions related to immigration, education and the economy. Topics aren't confined to progressive causes. "It's a totally open platform," Rattray says.
Rattray says his personal political beliefs were reshaped by his Stanford education. As a junior in Stanford's Washington, D.C., program, he'd felt disillusioned by how the close 2000 presidential election was resolved. "It challenged the political views I'd had since I was a child . . . . I had become more progressive, more socially liberal."
His change of heart was noticed by one of his younger brothers, who confided to Ben that he is gay. A painful part of his experience, his brother said, wasn't only the anti-gay attitudes of others, but "those who refused to speak out against them." Rattray recalls it as a conversion experience: a time when he began to understand his real goal in life was to help "elevate the voice of others."
It took a few years to translate that belief into a business plan. He went to the London School of Economics and earned a master's degree in political theory. He returned to Washington as a consultant and helped nonprofits apply for federal grants. He did a lot of thinking about ways to disrupt the traditional power structures and took notice of a growing website called Facebook. His admission to law school at New York University languished as he drew up business plans for a social media firm that would "connect people around issues."
In 2005, when he and Dimas happened to attend the same wedding in Hawaii, the two joined forces. "Everyone was out there for a week, enjoying the weather,'' Dimas, 32, remembers except "Ben has his laptop with him the entire time." He saw that Rattray needed help designing the software and the website. Having worked for a start-up that had been acquired by a large firm, Dimas thought a small company devoted to social empowerment "sounded appealing."
The pair began to focus solely on the company in the summer of 2006, aided by what grew to a $2 million angel investment. The site went live in February 2007. Dimas, a New Mexico native, is the company's chief technology officer, overseeing 40 computer engineers.
While acknowledging that Change.org is now making money, Dimas says most of the profits are going straight back into the 140-employee company to help it grow throughout Asia, Europe and South America. "Revenue is driving our ability to have more impact globally."
Tracy Seipel is a writer for the San Jose Mercury News.
