How much does change.org make on a petition? Let’s find out with Siri Shortcuts!
I will preface this by stating I have no problem with people who want to run a business and make a profit. And I also understand these businesses have admin and other office costs. I get it. It cost money to operate a business. I would even argue for your right to operate a business that accepts donations -if you’re doing it fairly and people are WELL aware of what exactly you’re collecting.
Now to change.orgs credit they did start putting a bit more detailed information that isn’t in the fine print after the complaints started coming in.
When change.org came about a few years ago I admittedly didn’t like the thing too much as I thought it reeked of “armchair activism” so I only signed a few here and there over the years. However I’ve now come to fully understand the clout of social media and what it brings- many eyes to a subject.
About a week ago a friend brought something to my attention that I thought was interesting- https://www.businessinsider.com/change-org-former-employees-demand-donate-george-floyd-petition-money-2020-6
I then decided to head over to change.org and make some sniffing happen using my iOS device, I wanted to see what exactly I could find to potentially help these people determine how much was made from the George Floyd death and the petition started by a young woman named Kellen.
Oddly enough you don’t even need a set of tokens to view their API, its right there under the hood of their site. If you’re on a computer just right click on whatever petition and you’ll see for yourself:
Unfortunately the data from the George Floyd petition started by Kellen is no longer there as change removed it. update: But I did get it!!!
However if one looks at the other petitions on the site, you can get a decent estimate as to what these are earning. In fact I’ll take the focus off #BLM for now as I think that inevitably taints some of the negative comments on news articles I’ve seen on this story- all the folks who are like “well if you can’t read”…
Let’s look at a petition for a little white baby. Look at the petition closely and I’m pretty sure you’ll understand how the picture and the title evoke emotions and urgency to help change! Granted that statement made directly below does tell you how it works but keep in mind people will be more evoked by the image and the title AND that change was only made after people started getting mad. I ran my tool from the sharesheet and looks like this has brought in around $42,539.08. Please tell me my math is off!
My math is based off info on the site here:
Here’s one for a bunch of Ontario children going to school:
Whoa that’s a lot of money! $38k nice!
How does this work? Basically I’m parsing data that’s directly and freely available on their site. No set of tokens to deal with-its right there under our noses! Here’s some pics of the logical steps needed to do this incase you want to say write a program to do this or maybe make a tasker task for android!
Here’s one for groceries! $22, 515 is some nice change for change!
Point is people are people and are very complex, its not the fault of the people who choose to donate to the George Floyd fund. You can clearly see emotions are easily evoked. This pulls at people’s heart strings. I expect better from a site called change. We all should!
Even my white mom (I’m a halfie BTW) who’s not exactly the biggest fan of what’s happening in the USA right now with the destruction, thinks this is refined trickery.
If you want my shortcut its available here and its free: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/567a9b86ea5544bd9d6120000a252150
You will need to know how to use shortcuts and you need to use it from the share sheet. Its iOS only.