Online petitions and the misguided concept of “Keeping people involved” by flooding them with emails has lost any effectiveness it might have had and is now doing more damage than good.
These two concepts are different sides of the same coin and suffer from the same problem. First, the keeping people involved part. I don't know whose idea it was, but someone decided that it was good policy to keep people in the loop by bombarding them with a constant barrage of emails. I disagree. At best, you get information overload. You also get a psychological state called habituation, where the emotional effect of the communication is dulled by constant repetition. With continued bombardment, the emotional response becomes more akin to irritation, which leads the reader to delete such emails unread. Finally, the pissed off recipient labels the emails as spam followed by formal requests to “Unsubscribe”. Unfortunately, every decent spammer knows how to change the email address slightly. Kossacks probably noted in the runup to the 2014 election debacle, we would receive emails from the DNC, the House Majority PAC, the Senate Majority PAC, ActBlue, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Jim Medina, etc., etc., etc. Every single one of these emails started with a desperate problem followed by an equally desperate plea for money.
This problem is compounded exponentially by a related problem. When one signs a petition to support anything, from banning fracking to saving pets from euthanasia, one's name and email address are now out there in the ether and, thanks to the wonder of technology, the petition signer has now become the friend of every conservation group from Greenpeace to the League of Conservation Voters, from the Humane Society to PETA. For a normal, want to be involved, person with more than one interest (e.g., politics and pets and prisons and the environment), fifty to seventy-five emails a day, every day, is probably a conservative estimate.
And let us not forget that as much as 90% of this email traffic involves pleas for money. “Just five dollars.” “Just three dollars?” “Even fifty cents will help.” And, even if the astute reader can figure out by the intro to the email that it's a request for money and hit Delete, it's still time wasted.
Now, finally, those petitions. A couple of years ago, when we could see boxes and boxes of signatures being rolled up to the office doors of politicians, these petitions probably had some effect, but now, with dozens daily covering every peeve on the face of the earth and being sent to every inbox for signature, the same issue of habituation raises it's ugly head with the recipients of these missives. The online petition is rapidly losing its effectiveness simply by being over-used.
Thanks for the opportunity to rant!