ChangeDotOrgScraper is an Python package that allows you to scrape online petition data from change.org.

Installation

To install in python, simply do the following:

pip install ChangeDotOrgScraper

Quick Start

Here we provide a quick example on how you can use ChangeDotOrgScraper to scrape petition data right from change.org.

from ChangeDotOrgScraper import scrape_petitions

# Specify the url of your scrape.org searches
## for instance, we shall scrape petitions from the search "supplemental nutrition assistance program"
url='https://www.change.org/search?q=Supplemental%20Nutrition%20Assistance%20Program&offset=0'

# scrape the petition data from change.org
SNAP_petitions_df=scrape_petitions(url)
print(SNAP_petitions_df)

It returns a dataframe with all the petitions data, which contains details such as the petition(s) title, description, date created, target audience signature count, location created, victory status, etc.

Requirements

Required packages

To use ChangeDotOrgScraper, you are required to have the following packages installed:

• requests
• beautifulsoup4
• tqdm
• pandas
• ast (Python standard library)
• re (Python standard library)
• json (Python standard library)

If you do not have these packages installed in python, you can do the following:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4 tqdm pandas

Citation

This package was made as part of a larger study on food stamps (i.e., SNAP), therefore, we do not have the paper ready just yet.

However, if you wish to cite, you may cite:

C Alba (2024) ChangeDotOrgScraper: A python package to scrape petition data from change.org. PyPi.

Questions?

Contact me at alba@wustl.edu