Goods Unite Us exists because, 15 years ago, the majority of the Supreme Court decided that campaign contributions by corporations were protected speech under the 1st amendment. Given that, we thought people should hear what companies were saying with their political contributions.

Since our formation, that’s exactly what we’ve done in order to empower our users to make their own voices heard, as consumers (hence our logo, the microphone).

 

The Value of Consumer Activism

One silver lining to the Citizens United decision is this: voters are also consumers. Since elected officials listen to their donors, their donors are often companies, and companies listen to their customers, that SCOTUS decision 15 years ago turned the whole economy into a kind of giant ballot box. Which is to say that, in addition to voting, you can make your voice heard politically by supporting (or not) companies based on which political causes they give money to.

In keeping with that, our users have always employed our information for the purposes of consumer activism. They’ve searched companies they shop at, or plan to shop at, checked to see if those companies supported the same causes, and when the answers were unsatisfactory, they switched to brands that did share their values.

Since you helped us hit the million-download mark last year, we’ve heard even more calls for expanding this basic function. Specifically, showing not just the number of views per brand, but somehow allowing users to tell each other, and the brands, how they felt about the way the brands use their money.

We heard you, and today, it’s finally available for our iOS users! (To our wonderful Android users, we’re working as fast as we can to do the same for you)

 

Make Your Voice Heard

Now, on every brand page, is a bar with 2 buttons. You can register your support or displeasure with any brand’s campaign finance activities using the two buttons, and see how the other users of Goods, in the aggregate, feel about that brand.

 

This makes it far, far easier for the brands themselves to see how you feel about the political speech they can only voice with your dollars. To be clear, neither Goods the company, other users, nor the brands themselves can see whether or how you’ve clicked one of the buttons. But everyone using the app can see what the entire network, as a whole, thinks.

It also makes it easier for you, as member of the Goods community, to see what the rest of the community is focused on. Similarly, it supercharges the effectiveness of consumer activism. Where previously users supported or boycotted brands mostly by themselves, this enables the whole network to be heard together. As it turns out, brands are a lot more likely to listen to a big group of their customers than they are to one or two people.

 

What’s Next?

• If you’re a new user, welcome! Please take a moment to make your voice heard with a few brands that you use the most often.
• If you’re a returning user, welcome back! We’d like to encourage you to go back through some brands you’ve searched before to test out this new feature.
• And for everyone, if you find something particularly surprising, share the page! There’s a share button in the upper right-hand corner of every brand’s page. You can send the data to friends, family, anyone who might be interested. As always, the bigger the Goods community, the easier it gets for our voices to be heard.
• As for the Goods team, our plans at the moment are to release this feature for our Android users as fast as possible. After that, we’ll better integrate information from this new feature into your profile section so that (for example) if a lot of Goods users have recently voted on a brand you’ve expressed your opinion on, you’ll get a notification letting you know about it.

Our mission remains the same, as does our commitment to your experience here. We’ll continue to tweak this feature and related ones to ensure Goods Unite Us remains the best way to make your voice heard!