Last May, CREDO Action launched a petition to repeal the Monsanto Protection Act, a law that allows Monsanto to ignore any court orders to halt sales of their products for safety reasons. The petition received over 250,000 signatures to reverse the giveaway — 13% of those signatures came from people who were recruited by their friends, who shared socially by email, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

The typical online petition relies on engaging a core group of activists who have taken previous actions with the organization, and usually fewer than 2% of signatures come from social sharing — for a petition with 250,000 signatures, that would mean at most 5,000 social sharing signatures. In CREDO’s case, not only did social sharing bring 34,000 signatures to the petition, but 24,000 of them hadn’t ever taken previous action with CREDO and were new to the their email list.

How did CREDO recruit over 24,000 new users to fight back against a dangerous giveaway to Monsanto? A major factor was optimizing their social sharing.

After activists signed the petition, they landed on a ShareProgress share page. Tests on similar petitions found the ShareProgress page convinced visitors to share more than 50% as much as the old CREDO share page.

Not only did CREDO increase the numbers of shares on their petition, but they optimized for headlines that would bring Facebook users back to CREDO’s website.

CREDO tested different Facebook titles such as “Monsanto shouldn’t be above the law” and “Sign the petition: Repeal the Monsanto Protection Act.” Guess which version did better?

“Sign the Petition: Repeal the Monsanto Protection Act” outperformed the alternate headline, bringing in 63% more people to sign the petition from Facebook.

ShareProgress’ optimized designs and share language testing tools made it easy to increase the number of actions through social sharing — this helped CREDO to find new potential members and grow their petition in an organic way.