How Change.org is Creating a More Autonomous and Data-Literate Company

Every day, thousands of people around the world visit Change.org to do a simple act that has the possibility to change the world: sign their name or start a petition. Anyone can come to Change.org to start a digital petition and use the platform’s reach of 100 million users to garner support and signatures.

A privately owned company based in San Francisco, Change. org’s 200+ employees in 18 offices around the world are working to connect people across geographic and cultural borders to support causes they care about.

Access to reliable product analytics is an important part of this mission. In 2016, Change. org made the switch to Amplitude for product analytics in order to make data more widely available and digestible to their global teams. Even in the early stages of adoption, the team says “the impact has been huge.”

Alice Benzinger and Shane Hall are two of the folks leading the charge for internal data literacy and communication at Change.org.

Amplitude’s integration with Slack has been key to increasing data literacy across teams.

One of the best ways to introduce people to a new workflow that involves using data in their day-to-day decisions, Alice says, is to use Slack.

“Change is a place where we use Slack a lot. We have a lot of channels, we are even deliberating on business decisions using Slack,” Alice said.

The entire engineering team uses Amplitude and Slack. Using the two together keeps robust conversations around data streamlined and actionable across global teams.

“The best thing about the Amplitude and Slack integration is that whenever people have a question or are talking about a specific metric, one of the users can pull in an Amplitude report to Slack,” added Alice. “People can quickly look at the data, understand the trends and talk about next steps right away without having to go back and forth between different tools.”

Change.org relies on Amplitude Dashboards, Funnels and Behavioral Cohorts every day to understand how different campaigns and experiments are performing.

“One really useful part of Amplitude is dashboards,” Alice said, calling them “a one stop shop” for the team to see various charts related to specific products.

Everyday, product managers do experiment analysis and operational analysis in Amplitude. They review customer acquisition campaigns for various countries, determining which campaigns are converting best and why. The ability to glean quick insights lets them turn around and share learnings with country managers so no time or acquisition dollars are wasted.

“A big selling point is being able to do complex analysis without a very complex backend and do a lot that you would normally have to hire someone to do,” Shane added.

Understanding complex user behavior is a priority for Change.org. They dig into questions like, ‘out of the people who signed a petition in the last 90 days, how many have signed up?’ Amplitude helps product managers and data scientists answer these questions quickly.

“Anything that we previously had to write a SQL query to figure out, we can now easily determine with a behavioral cohort, which has become a huge thing for us because it’s easier for people to look at,” Alice said.

This new level of self sufficiency for product managers and country leads benefits everyone, especially data scientists.

“Amplitude gives us tools that PMs and non-analysts can use to do 90% of the stuff they need to, allowing us to focus our analysts on work that is more strategic,” Shane added. “We can leverage their unique skill set versus mastery of SQL.”