15.Mar.2010 Small change, Big impact

On Friday, Generous.org.uk covered the news that we’ve exceeded 10,000 signatures on our ePetition. It’s great to get recognition from a site that says its about ‘finding small ways to change the world in a big way’. We couldn’t think of a better way to describe the ‘Say No To Phonebooks’ campaign!

Drilling down a little deeper on their site and we can see they’ve recently started their own ‘Generous action’ encouraging people to opt out of receiving a yellow pages directory. This action was the result of almost 150 people retweeting their instructions for opting out of receiving this phonebook recently.

This brought us to a point that’s been repeated a couple of times by printed directory advocates in - ‘people already have the option to opt-out and the numbers of people taking up this option are relatively low’. Well, perhaps if these instructions were easy to find at the front of phonebooks and on directory websites, maybe the number of people opting-out would be much higher and indicative of how people feel about these unwanted directories? It will be interesting to see how this figure increases with sites like Generous and tweeters spreading the word….