Daniel Lubetzky

I was struck by the following piece of data that Khaled, PeaceWorks Group’s CTO, just shared:

21.4% of international visitors to our site, www.OneMillionVoices.org, sign on to the OneVoice Mandate

18.2% of Israeli visitors sign on to the OV Mandate

and…

a whopping 38.4% of Palestinian visitors sign on to the OV Mandate!!!

The overwhelming majority of our 620,000+ signatories actually did not come from the web, but from grassroots signatory drives (on the streets, at town hall meetings, etc.).

I’ve always been under the assumption that the reason we don’t get that many people to sign up on the web is that people just are not inclined to sign up on the web to such issues.

But it now turns our that our problem is just getting enough traffic/visitors to learn about us, and once they do, an incredible number take the time to sign up.

Having 20% of your visitors sign up may not seem high, but by internet standards it is extraordinarily high – so much so that I asked the tech team to check if their data is indeed correct.  They used Google Analytics and IP mapping to evaluate how many visitors we are getting and cross-checking that with the number of online signatories.  They are firm that these numbers are correct in total (though there may be slight divergences between some IP addresses that someone may think are from one country vs. another, but the overall averages are correct).

So, I guess this means we need to work hard to get more Palestinians, Israelis and International supporters to visit the site.

It may also mean that when someone is criticizing OV and pointing attention to our site, they are helping us in fact, because such big proportion of unique new visitors is taking the step of accepting the principles of the mandate and giving us their email address so we can keep them informed and involved in future steps to amplify the voice of moderation!