Sign our petition to stop Arctic drilling! Protect baby seals! Keep “pink slime” out of our food!

Online petitions on actions like these can spread rapidly on social media. Petitions are a quick way of saying your piece about breaking news or asking your friends to get more active on a political issue close to your heart. You’ve no doubt seen them everywhere — over email, on Facebook, on Twitter — anywhere people spend time on the Internet.

But have you ever wondered if petitions actually “do” anything? The answer: It depends on who’s wielding this tool — and for what purpose. Creating change is hard. And you need to have a strategy to make it happen.

Here at Free Press and our companion organization, the Free Press Action Fund, a petition is a critical step in our larger strategy of fighting for policy change in D.C. Our petitions help us ensure the public is represented when key decisions are made that shape the future of public media, the Internet and media ownership.

Let me be clear: Our petition signatures don’t just sit in a database. Most are delivered electronically, many are mailed and still others are delivered in person to amplify our members’ voices. When activists sign a petition, we store their information in a secure database in keeping with our privacy policy. We maintain a list of congressional members and other decision makers, and email copies of all signatures and comments with the associated town, state and zip code of the signers. When creating our email outreaches, we work with our staff on the ground to get the best information on what’s happening in Washington. We include links to outside sources so that our activists can make up their own minds about national media, technology and democracy issues. And we send petitions only when we believe they will have an impact.

Our petitions cover a broad range of topics. In December 2009, for example, we flooded the Federal Communications Commission with 2 million petition signatures collected by Free Press and our allies in support of Net Neutrality. In the spring of 2011, we delivered over 100,000 signatures and comments to the House and Senate, defending NPR and PBS from deep funding cuts. And last November, we collected signatures and comments to support the journalists arrested while covering the Occupy protests. We delivered these messages directly to the arrested journalists to let them know that people around the country care deeply about the work they’re doing.

And that’s not all. While our intrepid team of public-interest lobbyists advocates for our causes with congressional staff on both sides of the aisle, we believe truly lasting change happens from the bottom up — and outside the Beltway. Our members engage with us on a number of levels — in 2011 alone, Free Press activists signed a petition, made a phone call, filed a comment to the FCC or donated to our organization one million times. We keep our activists informed by posting regular blogs on our website, and we write about our campaigns in the Huffington Post, other prominent online outlets and in papers around the country. We also reach out to both traditional news outlets and bloggers every day to make sure they’re covering the work of our activists.

Signing a petition is a valuable act for Free Press, and every signature helps build our movement. But while signing a petition is important, calls to lawmakers, visits to district offices and engaging in other “offline” volunteering efforts can move us even closer to better media for all. Our first priority at Free Press is to rally people around the U.S. to support public media, defend a free and open Internet, ensure that rural America has better access to broadband and fight media consolidation.

And are we effective? Since we don’t pick fights on the basis of what we can win — we fight for what we believe in — there is still much to do to win the change we want to see. Even though we haven’t won every battle, we’ve had a voice in all key media policy debates of the last decade. And we’ve built up momentum, leading to important victories in the last two years alone. Together we’ve made the “inevitable” AT&T/T-Mobile merger history, helped opened the airwaves to thousands more Low Power FM stations, defeated dangerous legislation that would have overturned the FCC’s Open Internet rules, successfully fought deep cuts to public media in Congress and put “covert consolidation” on the national radar.

So join our list, sign a petition and get to work fighting for better media.