An Appeal to Action: Rhetorical Analysis of Change.org’s Launch Page

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Change.org is an online petition tool with over 68 million users and counting. Change.org users can either support causes by signing petitions or create petitions and request signatures. The purpose of Change.org’s website is to increase the number of users in its social network in order for more people to create and sign petitions. Change.org generates and retains a large user base by gaining the trust of a worldwide audience, inspiring users to action and retaining users through an effective website design. For profit, Change.org depends on large organizations like Amnesty International and the Humane Society to buy advertising to support their petitions. Thus, its website not only recruits more users but also convinces large organizations to buy additional advertising.
Change.org gains user trust by creating an emotional link between the petition and the user. Spotlighted on Change.org is an image of a smiling cherubic seven year-old. In his picture little Josh, whose name has been provided by the description to the right, is healthy and brimming with life. Change.org helped save Josh’s life by convincing a pharmaceutical company to provide a compassionate release of an experimental cancer drug. Josh’s success story convinces viewers that Change.org is a reliable website for petitioning. Furthermore, Josh humanizes the petition process. He encourages the user to empathize with each cause, putting a face and story behind the petition. While Josh captures user interest and establishes the beginning of user trust, further victories immerse the user into the Change.org community. Underneath Josh’s photo are several victories varying from honoring a slain athlete to helping a family stop bullying at school. Many of the people ...

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...esired website location. Change.org also works hard to appeal to a worldwide population. It describes itself as “The world’s platform for change” and enforces the idea with an image of the world map behind it. Change.org opens up its petitioning platform to users of all languages by allowing them to choose their language at the bottom of the website. This option makes the website is open to Japanese, Spanish and even Tagolog speakers. It goes further and divides its English language options for different countries including Canada, the United States and India. The language and country choice not only change the language a reader sees each petition by but offers different petitions that are most relevant to the viewer based on location and language. In this way, Change.org optimizes the chance of finding a suitable petition. Introducing relevant petitions also

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