Change.org raises $25M as it prepares new mobile, political, and international tools (update)

Update at 2:29 p.m. Pacific: Updated to reflect the company’s clarification that while it’s currently working on upcoming mobile tools, it’s not specifically committed to a mobile app, a Change.org spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. 

Change.org petitions achieve their goals at the rate of once per hour, according to the organization.

That’s a lot of successful online signature campaigns.

The company, whose service enables people and organizations to set up online petitions, is fast approaching its eighth birthday, and it announced today it has raised $25 million in new funding. The company now has more than 80 million users, up from 50 million a year ago and only 35 million in May 2013, when it last raised new funding.

While charity and nonprofit users are at the heart of Change.org, with more than 500 nongovernmental organizations involved, the company has also developed revenue streams over the past year. Currently, it lets companies and organizations sponsor campaigns, meaning that they pay for a campaign they’ve initiated to appear prominently on Change.org. It also lets users spend a few dollars to help promote campaigns they care about.

“Today most nonprofits find support through direct mail,” said president and chief operating officer Jennifer Dulski in an interview with VentureBeat. Tools like promoted petitions are “taking this to the digital era.”

Dulski shared that the company is now focusing on three particular areas of expansion, especially now that it’s got new funding: mobile, political, and global. Its political efforts will include promoting its verified decision makers pool, one of the key ways the company gets politicians more engaged with the petitions that concern them. To aid in its global expansion, it will invest in things like translating its product into additional languages, integrating with new social networks, and so on.

On the mobile side, the company is working on new mobile tools, something the company has been planning to do for a long time.

“Our goal is to make it easy for people to take immediate action… and then to directly engage with the people and politicians that affect them,” Dulski said.

Two years ago, Change.org founder Ben Rattray said at a technology conference that he’d like to launch a mobile app that uses GPS to alert users when they enter a business that’s had a petition filed against it, though a spokesperson for the company said it’s “not specifically something [Rattray] has reiterated to the team.” It’s also not committed to even building a mobile app as it’s still exploring options.

And Change.org is not the only company looking to mobile as a powerful tool to mobilize support. Earlier this fall, 10-year-old Vivienne Harr, along with her father, founded Make a Stand, a mobile app for online crowdfunding for philanthropic causes. The app has garnered the support of Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.

This third round of funding comes from existing investor Omidyar Network, along with Bryan Johnson, Diane Tang, Joe Lonsdale, Michael Birch, Nicolas Berggruen, Sam Altman, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Gideon Yu, Katie Stanton, Lorna Borenstein, and Shawn Byers, among others.

Change.org was founded in 2007 by Rattray, and is based in San Francisco. This new funding brings the company’s total to $42 million to date.