Embeddable petition tool secures legislation to bring UK rail into public ownership

Many campaigning organisations need to do petitions and often reach for corporate products which are either “free” (meaning they keep all your data) or very expensive. Often they require sending people off your website, too. We Own It – which campaigns in the UK for public ownership of public services – has avoided these pitfalls by using a CiviCRM extension, InlayPetition, which allows them to easily create petitions for different issues and embed those on their main website.

The petition tool, which has gathered around 200,000 signatures so far, is easily styled to match the site, so they can use it alongside other page content. The petition encourages sharing on social media and donations and handles thanking. A custom dashlet lets shows graphs of petition take-up. Because all the data lives in CiviCRM, We Own It achieves data sovereignty and there’s no awkward export/import or worse – costly api integrations – to worry about.

Being built on CiviCRM extensions, there was no problem migrating CiviCRM from Drupal 7 to Standalone; the petitions work the same. Being an “Inlay” based extension means that the petitions work on any website, so caused no problems when they migrated their site from Drupal 7 to ProcessWire. The petition tool is built to work under heavy load, which is essential at key political times. This allows them to quickly demonstrate the weight of public support for their campaigns.
Due to the extensions being open source, other organisations have made use of the tool and at times have shared development costs for new features.

PS. if you’re a UK citizen and don’t think people should be dying in corridors of NHS hospitals, you can try out the petition tool yourself!