Skip to content

What you need to know

These concepts and questions will help you plan a petition before creating and using it.

Key concepts

Petitions are a function within the CiviCampaign component of CiviCRM. When an individual responds to a petition, an activity record of the type Petition is created. The record contains the individual's responses to the petition questions.

Petitions are essentially online surveys.

Petitions and campaigns

A petition does not have to be connected to a specific campaign. For example, if the Toft Organisation For Tenants (TOFT) used a petition to assess members' satisfaction with TOFT's web site, it probably would not need to connect it to a campaign.

The petition described in the scenario in the previous chapter, however, is part of TOFT's Demand for Better Housing campaign, which includes a survey and other activities. Connecting the petition to the campaign enabled staff to analyse petition responses in the context of the campaign's other strategies and activities.

Profiles and custom fields

When a site visitor signs a petition, a contact is saved and an activity is created. Profiles display the fields for each.

The contact profile collects information about the signer, including their email address. Capturing email addresses is necessary to validate and accurately verify submissions and count signatures, especially when you do not want to count multiple submissions from one person. This profile is required and must include an email address field.

The activity profile may collect information specific to the petition signature.

Prepare custom fields to store any questions you want to ask on the petition. Then create the profiles and select them when you create the petition.

To learn more about custom field sets, see Creating Custom Fields in Organising Your Data. To learn how to create a custom profile, see Profiles in Organising your Data.

CMS permissions

Set permissions to allow specific roles to Sign CiviCRM Petitions. See Set-up for the permissions you'll need to allow.

Key questions

Consider these questions about your online strategies before creating a petition:

  • Do you plan to send the petition via email?
  • Will you link to the petition on your website for people to sign?
  • Will you use other social media or offline strategies to drive people to your website to sign the petition?
  • How will you frame your message so that people will want to sign your petition?
  • What do you plan to do with the results from the petition?
  • What follow-up activities are you planning to continue communicating and building a relationship with petition signers?