Case study

How Change.org uses video to turn signatures into stories

TL;DR: Change.org uses video to help people explain why a petition matters to them and show its impact. After migrating to Mux in just over a month, their engineering and marketing teams got better visibility into video performance and engagement.

Change.org is a global petition platform where anyone can start a campaign in the hopes of getting decision-makers, from local government officials to CEOs, to take action.

With more than 500 million users, Change.org has helped rally people behind petitions that have a tangible effect — a cleanup is mandated, a person gets released from a detention center, a law gets rewritten.

Video is part of how Change.org amplifies its impact. Videos from signers help build momentum toward gaining more signatures, and testimonial videos show what the petition changed for a person or community.

Putting a face to a signature

When someone signs a petition on Change.org, they have the option to record a short vertical video explaining why the cause matters to them. It’s a feature the team calls Supporter Voices.

While it's optional, adoption is growing.

One viral petition — opposing a resort development that could displace locals and harm marine life — had more than 1,200 supporter videos.

“Now that we have LLMs and AI, a human face is more personal. People are telling you directly what they think. Video testimonials are more valuable than just reading messages,” says Grethel Bello Cagnant, a Staff Production Engineer at Change.org.

Grethel says this timing isn’t a coincidence. Governments reviewing petitions have started asking Change.org how it knows signatures are coming from real people rather than bots. While video isn't submitted as formal proof, it's part of how the team thinks about this problem.

Authentication extends into how the videos get surfaced. Change.org scores Supporter Voices in part on how much of a real human presence they show. For example, someone speaking with their face on camera ranks higher than someone talking off-camera or with an AI-altered face. The higher a video scores, the further up the feed it appears.

Video is also an important part of the post-petition process.

Throughout the year, the Change.org team features the stories of successful petitioners by producing videos highlighting their stories and each petition's impact.

Why Change.org switched to Mux

When the contract with their previous video provider came up for renewal, Grethel and her team evaluated several video vendors and decided on Mux because the reliable video infrastructure also included free, built-in data.

“With our other provider, we had no useful data, just the number of minutes and the top countries. And we already had that information anyway. Mux ended up being the most interesting option, giving us visibility into errors and engagement data,” says Olga Fetisova, Senior Manager of Quality & Production Engineering.

That data now serves two teams. Engineering uses it to find and target errors as they come up, and marketing uses it to see which videos are driving engagement on a petition.

Change.org migrated to Mux in just over a month with a three-person team.

“It went really smooth,” Olga says.

Once Mux Data was live, it showed the team exactly what kind of traffic was hitting their video pages. That's how they caught bots loading petition pages and playing videos all the way through, quietly running up their bill.

The team also points to a surprisingly delightful win. Changing anything about how the player looks — like colors and styling — used to mean a code change and a full development, QA, and release cycle. Now with Mux Player, it’s much simpler.

“I don't need to go through all the code to make that change. I can just add some parameters to the URL,” Grethel says.

A continued goal is reach. Change.org's petitioners come from all over the world, but their stories mostly circulate in English. A success in Brazil or Indonesia stays local when the video is only in one language.

The team is exploring Mux Robots for auto-captioning and translation to close that gap, and is also interested in Mux's MCP server, which would let them search video performance data conversationally rather than through a dashboard. Both help Change.org evolve how they use video to create greater impact.