Hey! Thanks for checking out ControlShift’s blog. We’ve moved our blog posts to Medium, and you can see them here: https://medium.com/controlshift-organizer.

A big congratulations to all of the ControlShift customers who have worked for years to stop the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. It was a long fight, but you proved the power of organizing. Thanks for all of the great work you do – it’s an honor to help support you!

We’re kicking off our events and groups series with a look at petition events.

When a petition has received more than 100 signatures and has been moderated to good or above, the petition creator will automatically be given access to the events tools — allowing him or her to run a richer, more active campaign. How can these features help support a campaign? Take a look:

A student creates a campaign to get more of his school's budget allocated to the arts.

After gaining one hundred signatures, he schedules a strategy meeting, so that he and his supporters can plan the next steps for the campaign.

They decide to hold a rally to increase media and community awareness of the campaign. He's able to add the URL of the event page to flyers posted around town and is able to collect offline signatures at the event.

After getting the support of the local community, the student schedules apetition hand-in event so that his supporters can join him when he presents his petition to the school board.

For all of these events, he is able to invite his current supporters to the event (pending admin approval), and once the event is moderated to approved or above, it is added to the post-signature daisy chain so that new signers are also invited.

While these are just a few examples, the petition event functionality could be used for demonstrations, media events, offline signature collection events, letter writing meetups, fundraisers, or anything else that increases the visibility and support for a cause or helps the petition creator run a more successful campaign.

Learn more

After more than a year of designing, coding, and tweaking, we’re ready to roll out our new Groups and Events features! With these tools, your petition creators can host events, your supporters can create local groups to discuss issues and meet up in person, and your organization can host days of action. Together, we hope these features will allow your supporters to run more impactful campaigns, while also building stronger relationships with one another and your organization as a whole.

Over the next week we’ll be giving an in-depth looks at the various features included in the toolset and the ways that you can use them to support your organization’s work. We’ll also be hosting a training on the tools and have added documentation on the features to our help center.

These tools are still in beta, and we’re eager for your feedback. If you find any urgent bugs, please send us a support email. If you have feature suggestions or other feedback, please add them to our newly-created community forum. Within the forum, you can also comment on existing feature ideas and up-vote the ones that you want the most.

Learn About Events and Groups

Instead of a campaign of the week, we want to let you know about our newest ControlShift organization, Greenpeace New Zealand. Greenpeace New Zealand's new distributed organizing platform, TOKO, launched Thursday morning and has already garnered nearly 1,000 signatures site-wide.

On TOKO, you can create petitions aimed at creating a more fair, just, and sustainable world. If you'd like to start your own petition targeting an issue in New Zealand, visit TOKO's homepage. 

This week's campaign comes from Democracy for America's YouPower, which is powered by ControlShift. YouPower allows people to start and run campaigns on a variety of issues.

This week's featured campaign calls for Governor Jerry Brown to ban fracking in California. The campaign was started in response to the recent announcement that Governor Andrew Cuomo had decided to ban the practice in New York State. 

Opponents of fracking cite concerns regarding water and air pollution, as well as health risks to the surrounding communities. This petition follows an earlier effort to pressure the California Senate to pass SB 1132, which would have imposed a moratorium on fracking.

In the less than 24 hours since the new campaign's creation, the petition has already garnered more than 1,000 signatures.

This week's campaign comes from HagamosEco.org, a ControlShift powered site run by Greenpeace Argentina. Hagamos Eco allows people in Argentina, and around the region, to start and run campaigns on environmental issues.

Using the toolset, a resident of Buenos Aires created a petition asking the Mayor of Buenos Aires to allocate a disused parcel of land to be a green space, instead of a stadium. The proposed stadium would accommodate 18,000 people and have three underground parking lots. Opponents of the proposed structure state that it would have an negative environmental impact and would weaken the foundations of existing structures in the neighborhood.

Instead of the stadium, the creators of this petition are asking Mayor Macri to convert the lot into a public green space with recreational and cultural centers. In the last month, more than 3,500 people signed the petition in support of converting the lot to the green space.

This week's campaign comes from you.38degrees.org.uk, which is 38 Degrees' member-generated campaigns site, powered by ControlShift. The Campaigns by You site allows people from across the UK to start and run their own campaigns on a variety of local and national issues.

One issue that has been prominent for 38 Degrees is opposition to privatising the UK's National Health Service (NHS). In the lead up to the passage of the Health and Social Care Act (HSCA) in 2012, 38 Degrees members signed petitions, erected billboards, and held numerous events. Despite their efforts, the law was passed.

However, earlier this week, it was announced that on Friday MPs would vote on a law that would roll back some measures of the HSCA and would exempt the NHS from TTIP. With only three days before the vote, 38 Degrees used the ControlShift toolset to create 650 separate petitions, each targeting a single parliamentary constituency.

Earlier today, 38 Degrees members delivered the petitions – which had amassed more than 230,000 signatures in three days – to members of Parliament. When the vote was tallied, MPs had supported the bill by a vote of 241-18. While there's a long way to go before the bill becomes a law, we at ControlShift were extremely impressed by the way 38 Degrees used the toolset.

You can read more about the Save our NHS campaign by visiting 38 Degrees' blog. You can also view some pictures from today's petition delivery (which includes the below picture of MPs queuing for their petitions).

If you'd like to start your own campaign on Campaigns by You, visit you.38degrees.org.uk

This week's campaign comes from communityrun.org, which is a ControlShift powered site run by GetUp! in Australia. CommunityRun allows Australians to start and run campaigns on a variety of issues.

One month ago, Joan and Jane, two aid workers, created a petition urging Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison to expedite a last remaining relative visa, which would reunite a dying father with a son he hasn't seen in more than two decades.

Abdi and his wife Fatuma were originally from Somalia, where they and their four children were living when the civil war began in 1991. Abdi and Fatuma lost contact with two of their children as they were fleeing from an attack on their neighborhood. For the next 15 years, Abdi and Fatuma lived in a refugee camp in Kenya. During this time, Fatuma worked for the UN and other NGOs advocating for rights for women. Her work led to the UN resettling them in Australia.

After relocating to Australia, the family found that one of their missing sons was also living in Australia – but one son was still missing. In 2007, the Red Cross was able to locate the missing son, Saacid, at the world's largest refugee camp in Kenya. Abdi and Fatuma applied for a last remaining relative visa for Saacid, but they have been waiting for approval for more than four years.

Abdi was recently diagnosed with liver cancer and was given three months to live. Because of his deteriorating health, Joan and Jane are asking the immigration minister to use his discretionary powers to allow Saacid to visit his family.

As of last week, Abdi has been moved to hospice care and his health continues to worsen.

This week's campaign comes from campaigns.walkfree.org, which is powered by ControlShift. Using the ControlShift toolset, Walk Free partners with organizations around the world to end modern slavery.

Together with The Freedom Partnership, Walk Free is pressuring the Australian government to improve safeguards for domestic workers and protect these workers from "severe exploitation and abuse."

Specifically, Walk Free and The Freedom Partnership are asking the Australian Government to ratify the International Domestic Workers Convention, grant bridging visas to domestic workers pursuing civil cases, and provide culturally appropriate rights information to people planning to seek employment as domestic workers.

This week's campaign comes from Coworker.org. Coworker.org uses the ControlShift toolset to empower employees to fight for change in their workplaces. A month and a half ago, Kristie Williams, a barista at Starbucks, created a campaign asking Starbucks to change its dress code to allow visible tattoos. Since launching, the campaign has received more than 25,000 signatures––including 14,000 from Starbucks baristas––that represents 5 percent of the Starbucks global workforce.

Today, Starbucks announced that effective October 20th it will allow baristas to have visible tattoos. Campaign creator Kristie Williams said,  "I am jumping up and down and am so excited that we can now be more comfortable at work! I'm thrilled that Starbucks listened to feedback from employees like me and has updated its policy. I'm also so thankful to the thousands of baristas and supporters who joined my campaign and shared their stories about why this is important. I never thought my petition on Coworker.org would be signed by so many baristas around the world and it’s great that when we come together, we can make our company better. I’m ecstatic and going out to buy a short sleeve shirt for work right now!"

This week's campaign comes from Auburn Seminary's ControlShift-powered site, Groundswell. Reverend Alison Harrington of Tucson and her church have been providing sanctuary to Rosa Robles Loreto since the beginning of August. Rosa is a local community member and mother of two who risked deportation after a traffic violation. 

Using the ControlShift toolset, Reverend Harrington has already collected more than 3,500 signatures in support of Rosa. Recently, with pressure from Groundswell supporters, the Tucson City Council voted unanimously to support Rosa. They're also sending letters to President Obama, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, and every member of Arizona's congressional delegation.

Last week, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva met with Rosa and is planning to arrange a meeting between Rosa's sons and Secretary Johnson.

When CREDO Action wanted to create a space for their members to begin their own campaigns, they used the ControlShift toolset.

The CREDO team has collected over 60,000 signatures to increase worker safety in factories, mobilized supporters to protect natural resources, and organized a national campaign to reduce gun violence by targeting mayors across the country. Through the ControlShift platform, CREDO Grassroots Action has empowered its members to take action on the issues that they are passionate about.

Recruitment

CREDO finds campaign leaders through three main paths:

The team will often know someone who is passionate about a salient issue and willing to lead a campaign

Because the existing CREDO Action mailing list is well-segmented by issue, the team sends targeted recruiting emails to members that have previously been active on a particular issue

Word of mouth attracts people who feel passionately and just need a platform

Training

Current campaign leaders are often part of the online organizing community so the team does not currently offer trainings to campaign leaders. However, the team does monitor campaigns that are started on the platform and provides basic feedback to particularly salient or popular campaigns.

Moderation

The CREDO Action team tries to be very lenient when it comes to moderating incoming petitions. Effectively, any progressive campaign, even if it is sloppy, will be published. The campaigns that are highlighted and featured on the front page are more polished and address salient issues.

Contact

In order to keep supporters from feeling overwhelmed by emails, the team limits the number of emails that campaign creators can send to petition signers to three per week. The team leaves the content of the email to the discretion of the petition creator, but they moderate and approve every email blast.

Testing

The team runs tests on petitions by sending emails to a small target audience, which is usually made up of CREDO Action members that have shown interest in that issue group in the past, and then tracking the progress of the campaign.

Success