In 2020, a petition on Change.org related to the murder of George Floyd generated $20 million in revenue for the platform. None of it went to the family. When that became public, the backlash was immediate: protests, phone calls, and a crisis that threatened the credibility of a platform built on the promise of amplifying people's voices.

I was Global Brand Director at the time. I helped lead the organization's response.

Understanding the damage. The crisis wasn't just a PR problem. It exposed a structural tension in Change.org's business model: the platform monetized attention around petitions without a clear mechanism for directing revenue to the people and causes those petitions represented. The George Floyd petition made that tension impossible to ignore.

Building the Reset. The response became Change.org/Reset, a public-facing initiative to acknowledge what had gone wrong and lay out a path forward. This wasn't a press release or an apology tour. It was a structured brand and communications effort that required reexamining how the platform created and captured value from petitions, how revenue flowed, and how the brand communicated its role in social movements it didn't originate.

The internal work. Before anything went public, the harder work happened inside the organization. I developed the presentation that laid out the case for change to leadership and cross-functional teams: what had happened, why it mattered, what the organization stood for, and what concrete steps would follow. Navigating that process meant holding space for intense internal debate while maintaining momentum toward a public response.

The external work. The Reset had to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously: petition starters who felt exploited, signers who felt misled, advocacy communities who questioned the platform's motives, and the broader public watching to see if Change.org would take real accountability or just manage the news cycle.

The work required balancing transparency with organizational reality, moving fast enough to demonstrate seriousness while being deliberate enough to get it right.