(Part 2 of my UnCommon Sense Series of rarely offered information,
opinions, and articles.)
Have you ever received or passed on a petition by email? If you have, there are some things that you should be aware of – things that the people who create these petitions won’t tell you.
I used to get a ton of email to sift through every day. (An occupational inconvenience associated with my kind of work. Read how I fixed this problem.) On a fairly regular basis, I used to get a petition where I was asked to add my name to if I supported the cause.
In my experience, petitions have always come from friends, and I have (so far) ALWAYS agreed with the cause that they are promoting. But I never add my name, never forward them on, and usually try to talk my friends out of sending them again. Why? Because they simply CANNOT work, and more likely work AGAINST the cause. Allow me to explain what most people fail to consider…
Reason 1 – Repetition
Most petitions ask you to forward a copy to the target recipient when a certain number of names has been reached. Let us use the example of sending it after 100 names (although I’ve seen anywhere from 50 to 500). Let us presume that you would be name # 97 and you send it to just 10 people (who all become name # 98). If all of them send it to 10 people, then there would be 100 petitions zipping around cyberspace with the same first 97 names. If those 100 copies go to 10 more people each, then the target recipient ends up with 1000 copies of the same petition, with only the last 3 names different. And that’s only if you were # 97. What if you are # 80? Or # 12?
True, the recipient might get swamped with lots of petition emails, but with that level of repetition, I can guarantee that their impact will be minimal to zero. They will simply be ignored and deleted.
Reason 2 – Individual Authenticity
If you really believed in a cause (as the petition signers obviously do), why would you stop at adding just one name? This is not the same as someone handing you a clipboard to sign, or including some other randomly verifiable information. In this case, you are free to add as many names as you like, with no accountability. In my experience, the believability of many of the names that appear suggest that this is quite common. You can bet that the target recipients will assume that much of the list is just padded trash.
If you have received a few of these, you will know as well as I do that they all have three common traits:
(a) If the last few names are legitimate, those names often have minor variations in formatting.
(b) The rest of the list leading up to the last few entries is perfectly formatted, with uniform entries throughout, no special ‘>’ characters from forwarding, etc.
(c) The petition is always within about 10 names of the stated limit for sending a copy to the target recipient.
Email simply does not pass through that number of people and end up looking as good as these petitions do. And why are we never name # 38 of 100? Because the people who start these petitions begin with 90% of the names already there (in some cases, copied from other petitions, which I have caught with some amusement in the past).
Conclusion
Email petitions can make the email populace aware of the issue if they read the petition. However they have close to zero credibility with the intended target recipient, and if anything, only serve to swamp their inbox and further enrage them against those who are promoting a good cause.
Solution!
Instead of asking people to perpetuate the use of a flawed tool, why not ask them to send a personal email directly to the target recipient, with copies to several other interested parties. The chances of a personal email being read, and its viewpoint making an impact, are vastly better than those of an email petition. Governments and large organizations pay people on staff to read correspondence. (The same people that simply delete email petitions.) Yes, it does take more time to write an email than simply signing your name, but that is the whole point. That is precisely why personal email letters have the credibility and impact that they have.
If you agree, why not go that extra step and share this information with the person who sent you the petition in the first place. Feel free to refer them to this link: http://www.intellact.ca/APWelch/EmailPetitions.htm.
The foregoing is my opinion. You can send me yours by clicking here.