Online petitions are a powerful but at times deeply flawed digital space. Despite the increasing importance of online petitions in galvanizing support for key issues, over 99% of petitions fail to achieve their goal, and the top 5% of users on Change.org (a popular online petitioning website) write 50% of the signatures. As a result, engagement in online petitions is incredibly uneven, and there are far more passive observers than active petitioners.

We introduce Zeal, a mobile application that encourages the otherwise passive consumer of content to take social action in the online petition space. Zeal combines news, a commonly consumed type of mobile content, with petitions related to the news articles. Drawing from the Fogg Behavior Model, we hypothesized that users who were invested in the news (motivated), faced with a simple ask (signing a petition), and given a prompt (Zeal’s news/petitions interface) would increase their petition-signing behavior. We then conducted a 10-day field study, through which we validated Zeal as a proof-of-concept for encouraging social action, but found that news alone is insufficient to fully motivate petition-signing behavior.

Zeal is a proof of concept. News can inspire social action, but even more needs to be done to motivate users to impact the world.

In the beginning, we set out to understand the various ways in which people interact with online petitions. From previous literature and existing products, we learned that engagement with petitions is often sporadic and noncontinuous. This was corroborated by the findings of our generative study, in which we talked to a diverse set of people to better understand what motivates them to interact with petitions. From there, we built Zeal, an app that pairs news articles with petitions to encourage increased petition engagement. During our 10-day field study, we learned that the simple pairing of news and petitions is still not enough to convert petition lurkers into petition signers and leaders. To do so, we’ll need to introduce more personalized, curated content for users to feel more informed about the actions they can take and why they should take those actions.