Infographic: Causes Friend Invitations Spark Great Change

Your ability to share actions with friends — petitions, pledges, and fundraisers — is a dynamic part of using Causes.com. Our team recently asked an interesting question: how many friends, and friends of friends, do you actually influence to take action? Behold, the influencer infographic!

This week we took a closer look at a successful campaign on our site and found some inspiring data. Protect Our Defenders — a nonprofit organization providing support services to sexually assaulted military personnel — declared victory last month after their petition gained offline success (Read the story).

10,577 people from around the world signed the petition and a majority of those signatures came through the Causes friend inviter. The data magnified reveals that six users on Causes, illustrated above, influenced a large network of people outside of their immediate friend invites. One example is Suzanne (last names have been removed for privacy). She invited six friends to sign the Lackland petition and 57 additional signatures sprung out of her invitations. Obviously, Suzanne has really motivated friends! But, more importantly, the numbers reveal that one invitation can spark a tidal wave of support for a campaign.

Having the power to inspire your friends to make the world better is what Chris Chan, cofounder of Causes, wants to make easier for people. “We believe that everyone has the power to make the world better. This power is expressed not by the concentration of wealth, but the ability to influence your friends…to sign your petition, join your boycott, or donate to your fundraiser.”

Noah Silas, an engineer at Causes, gave us the technical details regarding how engineers gathered the data. “Each dot signifies an action taker. Arrows point from recruiters to people they recruited. When Causes sends out invites on behalf of our users, we include the ‘recruiter_id’ in the hyperlink — a reference to the recruiters profile. We then record whenever someone takes action with that recruiter id set and give credit to that recruiter.”

The next time you take action on Causes, think about all of the people you can energize to participate in creating change in the world. The power you wield may surprise you.