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I know it's easy to be negative, but online petitions? If you think that'll make a difference you probably think Redheugh's heading a New York-based consortium looking to take over the club :nah:

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Has an online petition ever worked?

 

 

Probably not, but when that woman wrote the piece about Gately the other week, an online petition "organised" a massive number of complaints to the press council which caused a chain of events and got lots of publicity.

 

If people had done nothing online, I guess the number of complaints would have been miniscule in comparison.

 

I cant really see any physical protests happening, but at least this may show the greater world that we are bothered about this name change.

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Has an online petition ever worked?

 

The logical starting point is to examine the highest profile online campaign that the UK has seen to date. That said, when Peter Roberts posted his 80-word petition on the 10 Downing Street website, protesting against the Government's plans for road pricing, he started the ball rolling with an email to only 29 people asking them to sign up.

 

But his trick was that he didn't stop there. He then e-mailed every driving related website and publication that he could find, and encouraged people to forward his email. That they did, and within a week, his road pricing petition was the most popular on the site.

 

It was when he amassed 40,000 names that things really took off. Both the TalkSport radio station and The Daily Telegraph covered the petition, and this proved the catalyst for a media scrum that would see Roberts on the front page of newspapers in Washington, Australia and France. At one point, Roberts had to keep three mobile phones on the go just to keep up with the interest his petition was attracting.

 

 

 

Looking back, Roberts - who now runs the Drivers' Alliance, a group set up with funding attracted in the slipstream of the road-charging petition - believes it was the mix of online and offline tactics that ultimately made his campaign the success it was. "If it had stayed online", he told PC Pro, "it would have made it to around half-a-million signatures. But the fact that it was offline too, encouraged more people to go and have a look and join the debate".

 

In the end, 1,811,424 names were added to the e-petition, and Roberts believes it had a very definite real-world impact. "It kick-started a significant national debate, and put the fear of God up the politicians and assorted quangos," he argued, "which helped cause the Manchester congestion charge plans to fail".

 

Furthermore, Roberts received a response from then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, and while he's circumspect enough to accept that the issue of road charging is likely to return, in his words "it's certainly delayed things by five to ten years."

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