Turned around. Rattray was headed for Wall Street until and epiphany led him to start Change.org
(3 of 3)
Change That's Blue — and Green
It is easy to imagine that Change.org is agnostic about the work it does. Anyone can go to the site and create a campaign, no matter how reasonable or unreasonable the cause. Upset that your local high school discriminates against Hispanic students? Write up your petition, post it on the site and spread the word, and your campaign may unfold. The bottom-up feel of the site encourages the small, long-shot crusade. Yes, Avaaz.org has more than 3.4 million electronic signatures for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. But it took only 2,700 signatures on Kim Cassidy's petition on Change.org before Chase approved a loan modification that has allowed her to remain in her home in Powell, Mo. The site's appeal lies in its simplicity: anyone who provides a verifiable e-mail address can join, and anybody can launch a petition (anonymous petitions are allowed). It costs nothing.
Which is a reminder that, for all its do-gooding, Change.org is no nonprofit: it is a certified B Corporation, a relatively new kind of legal entity that benefits entrepreneurs who want both to make a profit and seek social change — a hot concept in business schools. Rattray raises revenue from partnerships with nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam and the Humane Society by allowing them to advertise on the site and offering them access to the site's list of 10 million members. He can tailor a list of potential donors for an organization dedicated, for example, to saving polar bears or fighting human trafficking. "We're fishing for supporters, and [Change.org is] creating the pond," says Sam Parry, director of online membership at the Environmental Defense Fund, one of Change.org's partners. Rattray says Change.org will make $15 million from such partnerships this year, and all the profits will be plowed back into the business.
Rattray is hoping to hit 25 million members by the end of this year. International growth will accelerate as other languages are added, starting with Spanish. For members, the connection to fellow activists is a valuable social feature of Change.org So too is the site's ability to alert members to issues close to their hearts. Using recommendation tools similar to those of Amazon and eBay, the site can mine your history of signatures to anticipate your interest in petitions about, say, deforestation in Brazil or nuclear activism in Asia. A nifty ticker on the site shows in real time how people all over the world are adding signatures second by second.
Rattray describes himself as independent and says he won't take sides in the nation's resurgent political and cultural wars. But Change.org's membership, judging by its petitions on social and political issues, plainly leans left. After Rush Limbaugh's verbal attacks on law student Sandra Fluke, who had called on Congress to keep contraception affordable and accessible, the site spiked with petitions calling for the right-wing radio host to be fired or for advertisers to ditch his show. The most popular of these, calling on Republican leaders to denounce Limbaugh, garnered nearly 13,000 signatures. In contrast, a pro-Limbaugh petition calling for a boycott of companies that pulled ads from his show fetched fewer than 10 endorsements. A handful of petitions against Limbaugh's left-wing counterpart, TV host Bill Maher, collectively have fewer than 100 signatures.
Rattray says he has no control over who comes to his site and that all petitions are allowed so long as they're not hateful and don't promote violence. But he allows that a petition with a pronounced conservative objective — say, the closure of an abortion clinic — is unlikely to be singled out for the kind of special assistance made available to Trayvon Martin's parents.
At the site's technology hub in San Francisco, Rattray's concerns are more pragmatic than political: with membership soaring, Change.org needs faster servers, more engineers. Most start-ups seeking Silicon Valley's top talent promise riches when they're sold or floated. Rattray says he's had success by holding out an altruistic reward: the chance to do good. "We would rather win the Nobel Peace Prize than have an IPO," he says. That would sound abundantly earnest even without the rising inflection.