Victoria M.

Something has happened in just the past 2 years with this site and it is not good. In Fall of 2015 I created a petition to preserve an important historic home in my small community that was threatened with demolition by a local developer. It attracted over 1,500 signatures which became a persuasive talking point in municipal dialogue. It was effective because at the time it raised huge awareness in our town that was unprecedented and listed people's street addresses alongside their names to provide verified proof. Nevertheless, the house was razed. A few months later, this developer obtained approval for a subdivision for 5 homes at the same time that he was covertly seeking an even higher density build by promoting a change in zoning that would allow him to build 6 times the amount of housing. So by September of 2017 I created another petition on change.org to rally opposition against this zoning change. While my own efforts have proven to be more effective than anything I gained from the petition (I managed to get the town to rescind its original zoning regulation since it was improperly noticed and the developer wound up withdrawing his application in the face of so much opposition) this round of petition creation was dogged by multiple damaging and inexplicably unresolved issues: signers prevented from signing, mislabeling their addresses as out of town and state which was a real problem when dealing with a local municipal matter since they would discount out of town signatures; scam signers, and lack of meaningful tech support. It appears that change.org was not asking people for their street addresses and may have only captured IP addresses which were nevertheless incorrectly showing up as out of town and state for many residents I happened to know. At the same time, there were many who told me theysigned (they left comments), but their signatures were never displayed. While I asked change.org to limit signers to local residents based on my zip code, this request seems to have thrown them and my petition into tech hell, and I never got a satisfying follow up response to my many issues which I pointed out to them. Being seriously outmanned, outspent and overpowered by town officials, developers' attorneys, etc. I still think for me to achieved this amount of success is a real David and Goliath story. But because I know how much time I spent distracted by trying to get these issues corrected by tech support, I have to conclude my effort could have been much more powerfully influential had it not been compromised by the bungling of what should have been a much swifter high tech way to grow awareness. I will be looking elsewhere when I create the next petition and urge others to do the same to save you all the aggravation and frustration... our time is more valuable.