Change Agent

Exactly a month after Trayvon Martin’s death, 3,000 people in Sanford, Fla., marched on the town’s civic center and demanded justice for the slain teenager — and punishment for the man who shot him. At the end of the hour-long march, Martin’s parents Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin spoke of their grief for their son and their anger that George Zimmerman, the neighborhood-watch volunteer who had shot him, was still a free man. The hall filled with loud shouts and amens and fierce cries for justice that drowned out even the family’s and lawyers’ speeches.

The march was the climax of a weeklong campaign to bring attention to Martin’s death, with a measure of its impact contained in 10 cardboard boxes that the marchers took to the Sanford city council. The boxes contained the names of 1.5 million people who had signed a petition at the website Change.org calling for Zimmerman’s prosecution. The signature drive helped turn Martin’s death into a national gut check — one that, amplified by growing media coverage, preoccupied broadcast news and the blogosphere until even President Obama offered an opinion. For Ben Rattray, Change.org’s founder, the campaign was the most recent and spectacular demonstration of the way ordinary folks can now mobilize extraordinary support for their causes. “Trayvon’s parents know they are no longer alone in demanding justice for their son,” he says. “We have the platform to facilitate people power in a way nobody’s seen before.”

(LIST: Ben Rattray in the 2012 TIME 100 Poll)

If the Facebook-enabled Arab Spring and the Twitter-happy Occupy movement have hogged the headlines recently, Rattray’s site has quietly enabled tens of thousands of people, many with little exposure to social activism, to launch homegrown crusades on issues ranging from corporate malpractice to immigration reform without ever gathering in a park or square. By marrying one of the world’s oldest organizing tools, the petition, to one of its newest, the social-media loop, Change.org is putting companies and governments under tremendous pressure to change their policies, sometimes in a matter of a few weeks or less. And it has invited everyone around the globe to participate. “Before, to be an activist you had to go on a march,” says Hayagreeva Rao, professor of organizational behavior and human resources at Stanford University. “Now all you need to do is log on.”

In less than five years, Rattray’s website has built a membership of 10 million — three times the roster of Amnesty International or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Two million members live outside the U.S. More than 93,000 petitions have been launched on the site, and Change.org claims over 1,000 victories, a number growing at the rate of about one a day. Rattray’s goal: to make Change.org synonymous with activism in the way Amazon is with books.

The Trayvon Martin petition didn’t go viral overnight. It was launched by a Howard University law student 11 days after the teenager’s death. It quickly caught the attention of Jon Perri, a Change.org staffer who reckoned the petition would be more persuasive if it came from Martin’s parents. So Perri contacted their attorneys to see if they would consider it. Once Fulton and Martin agreed to make it their own, it was given a new, hard-to-ignore name: “Prosecute the killer of our son, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.”

Support for the petition surged. Soon the case was drawing attention from the media, which led even more people to sign the petition. It went from 500,000 signatures to a million in less than three days and to 2 million in four more. At the peak of the drive, on March 22, the petition was getting 300 signatures a minute. Martin’s parents were stunned by the response. In San Francisco, Change.org’s engineers worked nights, concerned that the spike in interest could crash the site. “People begin to sense that their signature can have a real material impact,” says Rattray. Obama’s comment — the President mused that if he had a son, he would look like Martin — heightened that perception.

The New Tools of Change

Rattray is an uptalker: his sentences all end with a rising inflection, giving the impression that he’s not speaking so much as asking a continuous series of rhetorical questions. It’s a speech pattern that Hollywood sometimes uses to depict naivet. And it gives Rattray, a 31-year-old Santa Barbara, Calif., native, an air of acute earnestness that might be a disadvantage in your typical corporate setting. But on a recent morning in the high-ceilinged Washington conference room of Change.org Rattray is only one of a dozen young people talking, in varying intonations with uniformly sincere ardor, about the ways their online activism is changing the world. He takes a break from chewing on a chicken sandwich to take in the latest victory: a Pakistani TV station canceled a show after a Change.org petition against its host’s moral vigilantism got over 5,000 signatures. Rattray lifts his sandwich aloft like a trophy. “Isn’t that just awesome?” he exclaims, for once actually asking a question. The other staffers express their delight by clicking their fingers for a round of snapplause. “If we can make it in Pakistan,” he says, “we can make it everywhere.”

It probably helps his cause that Rattray does not seem like someone who was born to disrupt. The second of five children of a Raytheon-executive father and real estate broker mom, he grew up removed from the world of social activism. Rattray says he was “that golden boy: homecoming king, student-body president, head of the track team, sports editor of the newspaper and head of the [debate] team.” His ambition was to get to Wall Street as quickly as possible and become a Master of the Universe.

His epiphany came during his senior year at Stanford, when one of his younger brothers came out as a homosexual and talked about the trauma he had endured as a closeted gay man. Rattray, who admits to having been “part of the high school culture of making fun of [homosexuals] and using gay as a word of disparagement,” felt ashamed. His brother’s suffering also made him reassess his own ambitions. “I felt disgusted by the person I wanted to become,” he says.

By 2005, Rattray had given up dreams of high finance for public-interest law at NYU. But he threw that over after a friend introduced him to a site called Facebook and Rattray glimpsed a whole new world of bringing about social change via social media. He borrowed $1,000 from friends and family and persuaded a fellow Stanford alum named Mark Dimas to join forces with him. It would be two years before Change.org formally launched and nearly four more before it began to get attention outside a small circle of online activists.

The site really took off last fall, when Molly Katchpole, a 22-year-old college graduate, launched a petition against Bank of America’s plan to introduce a $5 monthly fee for debit-card users. The petition attracted over 300,000 signatures in a month and a great deal of media attention: B of A backed down, and several other banks dropped their plans for similar fees. Katchpole then targeted Verizon’s $2 fee for certain types of online payments; the telecom company caved after the petition gathered 130,000 signatures in 24 hours.

Other petitions have helped persuade Major League Baseball teams to make anti-homophobia videos and 1-800-Flowers to offer fair-trade blooms, and nudged Universal Studios to incorporate environmental messages on its website for The Lorax. Not all campaigns feature big targets. After 1,600 people signed a petition on the site, a zoning board in Fairfax County, Virginia, backed down from a ruling requiring an Iraq-war veteran to take down a treehouse he built for his sons. It’s the small causes that make the site unique, Rattray says. “We don’t tell people what issues they should care about. We let them decide and give them tools to do something about it.”

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.