Change.Org

Change.org built the world's largest petition platform: more than 500 million people across 196 countries. Petitions mobilize millions, but they end with a signature, and the conversation moves to feeds built for outrage. Ideas for Change is Change.org's answer: a civic engagement platform where residents propose ideas for their city, vote on their neighbors', and see the most unifying ones carried into live deliberation and delivered to city leadership. Fantasy designed the platform end to end: the resident journey, the interaction model, and the visual language, taken from narrative brief to build-ready design in four weeks.

A civic platform asks a lot of a stranger: your name, your address, your faith that participating matters, all with trust in institutions near historic lows. So Fantasy ran every design decision through two questions: will the most skeptical resident believe this, and will the busiest one finish it? Every screen had to satisfy both.

The interface tells residents exactly how their vote is used. Civic platforms tend to imply the most votes win; on Ideas for Change, votes are one signal alongside deliberation and feasibility review, and the product says so at the moments that matter: submitting, voting, waiting for what happens next. The design swaps gamification for progress cues, criteria previews, and status updates. Trust is the product, and the interface is where a skeptical public decides whether to give it.

Residents land on their city's page, post an idea, verify they're local, vote on what their neighbors propose, and pass it on: one mobile-first flow, built for the moment a friend's link arrives in a group chat.

A single design system runs every city. It inherits Change.org's foundations, then extends them with patterns built for civic participation: For/Against voting cards, city-specific hero illustrations that give each community its own front door, and a politically neutral visual tone. Vote counts stay hidden until after you vote, so the interface informs participation without steering it. Built for one pilot, structured so that every new city, from Bozeman to Albuquerque to Jackson, inherits the system and keeps its local character.

Ideas for Change is live in more than ten US cities, from Bozeman to Albuquerque to Jackson, Tennessee. In the first pilot (Bozeman, December 2025), residents contributed 193 ideas and cast 21,000 votes on the future of housing; one hundred residents, selected by civic lottery to mirror the city, deliberated the leading proposals and delivered the results to the Mayor's office. Each new city launches on the same design foundation.