As Executive Campaign Director here at Daily Kos, one of the most frequent criticisms I hear of our work is some variation on why petitions are useless:
Petitions are pointless. They don't accomplish anything. Decision makers don't take them seriously—if they pay attention to them at all.
Sure, that's fair enough. It is true that members of Congress, heads of corporations, members of the news media, and other decision makers don't take petitions seriously. (Although petitions can be useful in getting you meetings with decision makers, or in getting a media write-up that mentions your targeted decision makers, both of which have utility for political activists.)
However, just because decision makers don't take petitions seriously misses the main point of petitions and why they are important.
Petitions are sign-up forms for your organization. They are a way to build a contact list of like-minded people, so that you can send those people emails with more impactful actions on related topics at a later date.
Since Daily Kos founded our email list in August 2010, we have had more than 2,000 petitions. Very few of these petitions had any activist impact, in and of themselves. However, collectively they generated us an email list of over 4,000,000 people (2,760,000 of which are still subscribed) who we then contacted with calls to action that achieved the following which are continued below the fold:
Over $10,000,000 raised for our endorsed candidates, and over $7,500,000 raised for Daily Kos itself;
Over 24,000 volunteers to help get out the vote in 2016, and 6,000 in 2014, who collectively generated several million voter contacts;
Over 500,000,000 clicks on the Daily Kos Recommended email, helping to spread progressive content far and wide;
Over 4,000,000 signups for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations through our paid lead generation program, including 206,154 for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and 179,684 for Bernie Sanders's campaign (the Sanders signups went on to donate $5.7 million to Sanders);