Twitter sales exec joins Change.org — which just hit 40M users

Former Twitter sales exec Amanda Levy has joined Change.org to lead the organization’s sales force as vice president of sales. Levy previously was the first salesperson and 10th employee at Yelp, and she led Twitter’s medium-sized business sales team.

“Through my experience at both Yelp and Twitter, I have learned how to build world class sales teams,” Levy said in a statement. “It is incredibly rewarding to know that I can now apply these skills to building the revenue engine at Change.org, which empowers people to make social change all over the world.”

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The hire seems like a good fit, and not just from the sales experience side.

Change.org, not shockingly, is about social change, and while Levy led over 100 salespeople at Yelp and 150 at Twitter, she’s also spent the last year on sabbatical, traveling, biking, and studying to be a yoga teacher as well as serving as a board member of a nonprofit that used yoga to bring stress reduction techniques to underprivileged youth. She’s also previously worked with education companies.

For those who are wondering why a .org needs a VP of sales, Change.org is not nonprofit.

Instead, it’s a certified B corporation like other corporations such as Etsy, Ben & Jerry’s, and Patagonia, which have to “meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.” Unlike many businesses, Change.org says, “our business is social good.”

And while Change.org plans to keep petitions free for its just-announced 40 million users, an innovative native-advertising business model has it promoting — and now, I suppose, selling — promoted petitions, which simply raise the profile of key petitions and make them more noticeable on the site. With 500,000 petitions created on the site, up from 100,000 in 2012, rising above the noise is increasingly difficult.

“Amanda’s experience building world-class sales teams will help us achieve the financial scale necessary to serve and empower hundreds of millions of users the world over,” Change.org CEO Ben Rattray said in a statement.

Change.org brought in about $15 million in revenue last year and just recently announced $15 million in funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic venture, Omidyar Network.

Levy’s hire is the second high-profile addition for Change.org this year. Former Yahoo and Google executive Jennifer Dulsky joined the company in February as president and COO.

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