Launching a Successful
Petitioning Campaign:
There are a number of differing
reasons why an individual may feel the need to launch a petitioning
campaign, but more often than not, they are unable to identify a
starting point in the process. Given the right resources and knowledge,
a petition can be an excellent tool for change. The successfulness of
such a campaign is dependant on three key steps, those being the
planning and development stage, implementation stage, and the execution
stage. In this article we will focus on each of these three steps to
develop a plan which, if followed, will help to ensure the success of
your campaigning.
As is essential with most
formal tasks these days, petitioning requires a certain amount of
planning to account for all of the aspects of a petition that need to be
brought together to complete a successful operation. In the diagram
below, we show you the three components of the planning stage – the
three things you will need to make a decision on before proceeding to
step two, as well as the possible choices for each.

What we see here are three
crucial factors that will affect the effectiveness of the petition. Your
planning and preparation should focus on each of these. If you have more
than one organiser or volunteer working on this campaign, be sure to
form a solid plan for each of these people to refer to, should any
confusions or questions arise in due course. By thinking ahead, you wont
be left having to reflect on hindsight should something go wrong
unexpectedly. Generally, the same planning stages you would employ when
creating a corporate report or publication, formal presentation, or
official document, can also be applied to a petition. That’s because a
petition technically is an official document.
Moving on to the second of our
three necessary considerations any petition should be given. The
implementation stage is all about getting the results of your planning
into some type of physical form. Assuming that you have decided on a
manual type of petition, you will need to create forms for respondents
to fill in – allowing them to acknowledge their support of your cause.
Below, we have included a basic, potential layout for these forms,
utilising the functionality of Microsoft Excel.
As you can see, taking a
simplistic approach to this task can be just as effective as an
advanced, time-consuming approach. One of the most important things to
remember when you create these forms is to include ALL the necessary
data fields. A recent petition in New Zealand failed due to an
insufficient selection of data being collected from the 200,000
respondents. If only the organisers had spent a bit more time
contemplating the specific details they were going to collect, the
petition would most likely have been successful.

Having drafted, published, and
printed the completed forms; they should be distributed to organizers
and volunteers in order to move on to the final stage in the petitioning
process. As well as this, signature gatherers should be briefed on the
pending campaign, and the finer details, which have now been decided.
When this is complete, and all the relevant parties know their roles and
their importance to the overall campaign, we are ready to move on to the
execution stage.
All of your preparation work
has now been done. You have planned the most important features of your
petition; implemented and converted those plans into physical form, and
additionally have the appropriate materials ready to collect the
signatures you need. It is now time for your volunteers to head out on
to the real world and collect as many signatures as possible. There are
many tips which can be useful for manually collecting signatures. To
investigate these,
www.startapetitions.com
is an excellent resource. The overall idea is to collect as many
signatures as possible, effectively creating more and more support for
your cause. At the end of the day, the more respondents you have, the
more chance you have of a successful outcome.
When it comes time to halt the
signatures and support collecting process, the most difficult aspects of
the petition are well and truly completed. There are, however, a few
final administration tasks still to be completed.

As you see in this diagram, we
are firstly expressing our appreciation to those who have assisted us in
mustering public support on our issue. It is only right that these
people be formally acknowledged for their efforts. Additionally, the
petition should now be copied and sent to the target which was decided
in the planning stage. On the successful delivery of the final report –
your participation as the organizer may or may not be concluded. Given
that the target party’s response is unknown, further negotiating may be
necessary to complete the entire process with a reasonable, reciprocal
outcome. Because of the inability to predict whether or not this will
happen, we will not cover it in this article. Negotiating is in itself
an entirely separate topic, well past the scope of this
informational article.
Regardless of the topic or issue on which you decide to petition, the formula above is an excellent template to work off, and can easily be applied to most situations. At times, petition subjects or specific case characteristics will call for a much different approach to be called upon. We will leave the identification of such a scenario you. Petitioning requires mainly skill, and a touch of luck. For that reason, we wish you every success in your endeavors, knowing that you now have the skill set you need to begin a triumphant campaign.
Thanks to petitions and start a petition sites.
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