Effective petitions (November 2025)
We cannot only do the most good with our money by donating to top charities[1] and with our professional time by pursuing high impact ethical careers[2], but also with our moments of spare time, simply by signing online petitions or sending action mails.
Here is a list of ten top impact petitions. Those petitions can easily be thousands of times more effective than most other petitions, because they are recommended based on the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework used in Effective Altruism.
If the petition is important in the sense that it addresses a huge problem (in terms of welfare loss or rights violations, such as human extinction from unsafe artificial superintelligence or animal suffering from factory farming),
if the petition is tractable in the sense that it offers a feasible, realistic, cost-effective solution (such as a politically feasible ban), and
if that petition proposal is neglected in the sense that it does not get much attention,
then the petition is most likely extremely effective.
The petitions below are most likely at least 10 times as important, 10 times as tractable and 10 times as neglected as most other petitions, which means they are at least 1000 times as effective. Signing one of them is equivalent to signing more than 1000 average, common petitions.
[1] At effective giving platforms such as Giving What We Can (UK-US), Effectiv Spenden (Germany), Mieux Donner (France), Ayuda Efectiva (Spain), Benefficienza (Italy), Doneer Effectief (the Netherlands) or Effectief Geven (Belgium)
[2] Advised by 80000 Hours or Animal Advocacy Careers.
Hey Stijn, a few critical points on this.
Iâm worried about claiming any specific petitions are âeasily thousands of times more effective than most other petitionsâ, for reasons similar to this post.
Iâm unsure how youâre judging âtractabilityâ here, but Iâm doubtful about the tractable routes to change for some of these. For example, the shrimp change.org petition made for a class project with ~400 signatures. Even if this petition got 10x or 100x the signatures, I donât understand the Theory of Change that results in any person/âgroup/âorganisation making meaningful change. (For some petitions, like UK Parliament ones, there is a clearer route to impact, but it still requires lots more work and luck for the debate to become actual change).
Even if some petitions are super impactful compared to others, petitions might not be impactful compared to other interventions. This is somewhat offset by petitions being really âcheapâ (low time, non-fungible time, low/âno funding costs). However, if youâre recommending people sign petitions they donât know much about, they might reasonably want to spent time researching the issues, which increases time from ~10-15 sec to ~10-15 mins, which is a non-trivial amount of time.
Regardless, I made this really simple website to visualise your 10 recommended petitions more clearly (like 2-30 mins with ChatGPT). Would be open to working on this more, depending on yours and otherâs thoughts/âresponses to the concerns above!
These are valid points. I wanted to see how much time it will take me to find 10 promising, high-impact petitions. I could easily find 7 very good petitions, but the final 3 were harder to find. Overall it took me a few hours.
I partially agree with your concern about the shrimp petition lacking a ToC, although that petition still contains a clear, feasible and well-targeted ask in my opinion. But it could be that such change.org or class project petitions lack credibility and hence are less effective.
If people spend more time researching the issues, I consider that as a positive side effect. People learn about the causes. I bet people learned about AI safety by seeing me recommending those petitions. It might result in people supporting those causes in other ways in the future, for example by donating money. Especially if the petition comes from a highly effective charity. Any way, I still consider signing petitions as the cheapest altruistic thing that one can do, especially if you have a platform that offers you the most effective petitions so you donât have to look for them yourself.
Nice that youâve made that website. I also had in mind a website or online platform that regularly offers you a few top-effective petitions to sign (and perhaps a newsletter that informs people when new petitions are available). The most difficult part may be regularly looking for and selecting those petitions. As I said, quickly finding 10 petitions was already a challenge, and I donât think I can easily find 10 other petitions next month. But looking for a few petitions every few months should be feasible for me in my spare time. And if more and more EA-aligned people and organizations inform me/âus about new petitions, it becomes even more feasible. And if you and other effective altruists also contribute to this website by looking for effective petitions, we may have something fruitful.
As petitions are such a low bar in terms of altruistic engagement, I also donât think it is worthwhile to have a team of (professional) effective altruists spending much time assessing petitions. Itâs not such a big deal, in my opinion, that a weakly tractable petition such as that shrimp petition gets selected. More problematic would be if we miss a highly effective petition. False negatives (not recommending top effective petitions) are more problematic than false positives (recommending weakly effective petitions), because signing a petition doesnât take much time and there are not many top effective petitions. There are petitions that are counterproductive and are negatively effective, but I think we are able to quickly recognize and not select those.