TedxManila: Big changes through micro-movements

Online petition giant Change.org started its Philippine operations this year with 27,000 local users.

Through local efforts, it has since produced one of Change.org CEO Ben Rattray’s favorite victories: a public school principal in Mindanao launched an online campaign calling for local government to fix their school’s landslide wall.

 
Change can start small

On the wings of such an inspirational story, Change.org's founder Ben Rattray left this timely message at TedxManila in UP Diliman on Friday, reminding the intimate audience that small but well-defined aims can have a huge impact:

“Focus on one thing and crush it. [Have an] amazing execution of a single idea because that will build the foundation [of your campaign],” said Rattray, observing that people tend to “try to do too much.”

Launched five years ago, Change.org had lots of features. “We had a social fundraising program, school-based volunteerism…all this stuff,” he said, but it was the simple and focused petition service they had that left a mark.

 

Rattray cited the campaign of 22-year-old Molly Katchpole against Bank of America’s $5 debit card fees, which succeeded with a 306,894 signature petition, as she took her cause offline and cut cards in front of media at banks’ doorsteps.

 

“This isn’t the weight of Occupy Wall Street, where there’s this massive, ambitious, fundamental reform; changing the structure, banking system, financing,” said Rattray. “They didn’t get very far. It was abstract, slow, difficult, and not specific.”

 

The power of Molly’s simple petition according to Rattray, was that is inspired thousands of other small petitions regarding banking and consumer interests, something which he claims has introduced reform in a manner that has rarely been used before.

 

Filipino social media power

 

Because of “impressive” social media penetration in the Philippines, Rattray sees more victories in the future like the Mindanao principal's story, a clamor for change buoyed by concerned citizens themselves who demand accountability through the internet. 

 

“In the Philippines, we’re seeing an explosion of campaigns on corruption, on animal rights, on individual issues around the country and it surprises us,” he told GMA News Online. “We never know what’s going to happen.”

 

Aside from the direct impact of campaigns coursed online, Rattray said that the method is rife with “inspirational value.”
 

   

“It's not about changing policies. It's about changing culture and changing behavior,” Rattray told TedxManila attendees. “One of the biggest, certainly around the world, impediments, to social change is the sense of hopelessness which is corrosive to democracy.”

 

In a structure driven by empathy, the enemy of change is inaction.

 

“Everyday experience has proven it,” said Rattray, who made “Time Magazine’s” list of “100 Most Influential People.” He added, “We are not born apathetic. We have the experience of having impotence, of having no impact [to society]”

 

For him, online petitions and micro-movements--small campaigns with big implications, empowers citizens “like never before” and gives them hope that change is possible.

 

With constituents and consumers having social media power, Rattray said that “governments and companies must think twice.”

 

“What’s exciting for us actually is people power, letting issues bubble from the ground up, and democratizing democracy,” Rattray told GMA News Online. “People power is not episodic, but a daily reality.”-- KDM, GMA News

 

TedxManila is an independently-organized convention which offers inspirational talks served the Ted Talks way.

Photos by Roehl Niño Bautista