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There's a difference between "civic engagement" and "Selling email addresses to the National Republican Senatorial Committee"

Does having a vendor relationship with the NRSC fit within your goal?

Change.org makes their money nearly exclusively by offering "partner petitions" as secondary actions in the "daisy chain" and then selling any emails (and associated information) to "partners" for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1-2/email. Partners then add these email addresses to their own email lists.

Your most noteworthy campaign to date, and what is probably one of your biggest individual drivers of list growth, was the petition Prosecute the killer of our son, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin created by the parents of Trayvon Martin. You would've then taken those new-to-list emails and then sent them to campaigns that then 'chained' to paid partner petitions.

How much revenue have you made to date off of Change.org list members originally added to your list as part of the petition created by the parents of Trayvon Martin?

Correct. Your customers/partners need to make back the amount they spend and first-time signers are probably poor performers for partners.

But I'm not asking just about revenue from the initial signature, I'm talking long-term revenue from users who joined Change.org initially through that petition and then took further actions that resulted in revenue for Change.

How much money did Change make off the Trayvon Martin petition?

It’s important to clarify something here, though: we don’t sell email addresses. Our advertising revolves around choice; people choose to opt-into learning more about campaigns and organizations that interest them.

Sure, you don't arbitrarily sell email addresses, but you do work to get users to sign an advertiser petition, which you then view that as an opt-in for you to sell my email for $1-2 to the advertiser.