After creating your petition, we provide an easy way to share your petition on Facebook and Twitter with Change.org’s social media sharing tools.

Simply log in to your petition, and use the “Share this petition” button on the left. Choose whether you want it to be shared on Twitter or Facebook, and your petition will automatically be posted to your friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter.

We recommend using this tool more than once to get your petition the most exposure possible on Facebook and Twitter. Just log in to your petition and click "Share this petition" to post it again. You can also add a personal message to the post to give your followers an update. 

In addition to sharing your petition on your own social media profiles, you can:

• Join Facebook groups related to your petition topic or location and share it there
• Join online message boards related to your topic or location and share
• Link to your petition in the comment section of related news articles
• Tweet directly at influencers and ask them to retweet

Like sharing to social media, emailing your friends and family about your petition and asking them to sign is a great way build support and gain signatures. 

Asking your friends and family to sign and share your petition is the absolute best way to build momentum for your petition. Not only do they know and support you, their signatures show how important this campaign is to you and your community. 

Our Petition Update tool is one of the most effective ways not only to get more signatures, but also to keep your supporters updated and encourage them to take action to win your campaign.

Angie – a mum who fought for stronger anti-bullying laws – used the tool to send petition updates to her supporters and gained the signatures she needed to win her campaign.

In the video below, Angie talks about her story and Change.org Senior Campaigner Kelly Sawyer describes how you can use the Petition Update tool like Angie to make your change happen.

Our top three tips for using Petition Updates to help win your petition:

1. Update your supporters every single time something happens in your campaign
Remember they signed your petition because they really care, so they will want to know what happens next. If you’ve got something valuable to share, send it, even if it’s every day. But at least share some news once every week.

2. There are many reasons to post an update, try to use each of these in your campaign:

• Share media coverage or news stories that relate to the campaign
• Ask your supporters for advice or contacts that will help win the petition
• Tell them when you’ve been in contact with the Decision Maker
• Ask your supporters to help your campaign in some other way, like donating to a Crowdfunder, posting on the decision maker’s Facebook page, or tweeting at them

Example:

3. Always ask your supporters to do something in support of your petition when you send an update. Here are a few examples:

• “Read and share this news article so more people hear about our campaign”
• “Leave a comment if you have ideas for how we can win the petition”
• “Tweet at the decision maker”

Example:

Is your decision maker hosting an online conversation, or is there a Twitter conversation going on around your issue marked with a specific hashtag? To get attention from your campaign, start using the hashtag yourself to spread the word.

Are you fighting a longer-term campaign, one that many groups and individuals might want to tweet about? Create a hashtag for your campaign so that supporters can follow the campaign updates and talk to one another on social media.

For events and actions, hashtags should be as short as possible, and should be spread widely in advance. Abbreviations and acronyms are okay (Example: #NN15 for Netroots Nation conference 2015). For branding a campaign, hashtags can be a little longer to allow for full words, and potentially, the decision maker's name.

The title of your petition automatically generates as a tweet or facebook headline when people share your petition. Sometimes your petition title might work for the petition, but may be too long or not make as much sense on social media platforms. It can be a great idea to try and customise your headline for sharing. Here you can adjust your title, add in your decision makers twitter handle, or include a hashtag and really bring your petition to people’s attention.

Simply click on the drop down icon next to ‘customise your headline for sharing’ and edit away. If you are going to use a twitter handle, make sure you put a full-stop before the @ - this will mean more people will see the tweet!

Example:
Here Rosie has included her decision maker’s twitter handle in the headline for sharing and also two hashtags for her campaign.