Summary

  • PledgeBank organised promises around a task, a supporter target and a deadline; its early reminder emails put recruitment back on the creator’s to-do list.
  • A June 2006 snapshot recorded 295 successful pledges, 1,272 failed and 296 still open. Asking participants about subsequent action was a further job the team was considering.

Eleven days after PledgeBank launched, its developers were already teaching the website to nag. A good intention could be entered in a form. Getting enough people to join it required a less glamorous collection of activities, including publicity and sending messages. The inbox was going to help.

The launch announcement of 13 June 2005 offered pledges to plant trees, help clean the banks of the River Taff and support local retailers. The idea, described in the operator’s later account of the project, was a conditional commitment: someone would do a thing if enough other people joined in. The arrangement gave a person contemplating a lonely good deed a way to assemble company first.

The work behind that simple proposition appears in a developer’s post on 24 June. Francis Irving reported that quite a few creators had failed to realise they needed to publicise their pledges themselves. Passing traffic could bring some signups. The person who had proposed the task still needed to recruit. So an early email would remind a creator with few signups, after a few days, to do some publicity.

A second reminder used arithmetic. For a pledge at least a week old, the site checked the average signup rate over the previous week. If continuing at that pace would leave it short at the deadline, an email offered ideas for promotion. The promise now had a small, unsentimental companion: at this rate, the numbers would fall short.

That calculation made the deadline useful while there was still time to do something. A target sitting on a page could look reassuringly precise; the rate check asked whether people were actually arriving fast enough. The practical response belonged to the creator, who could put more effort into finding the right audience.

Success created another communication job. The same post reported that many creators had not messaged their signers after a pledge succeeded. A problem with an announcement form in some browsers had contributed to the silence. Irving added a reminder a few days after success. The website could count a group into existence, then prompt somebody to tell the group what to do.

Outreach also occupied the organisation running the site. In August 2005, mySociety asked volunteers to share a PDF presentation with nearby charities and community groups. The presentation explained the service to small grassroots organisations. A tool for assembling people needed people to introduce it to other people. The recursion was entirely practical.

The operator’s retrospective describes SMS as important at launch. Text messages opened participation to people who were away from the Web or uninterested in it. A shared task could draw on people whose everyday means of communication was a phone in their pocket.

The first-birthday figures published on 21 June 2006 recorded 1,863 pledges: 295 successful, 1,272 failed and 296 still open for signatures. These were the service’s pledge statuses. In a reply six days later, Tom Steinberg described asking everyone in a successful pledge whether they had acted as a follow-up system now on the agenda. Recruitment had a counter; carrying out the promise needed its own account.

That proposed follow-up would put a new question to a group the site had already counted as successful. The threshold had assembled willing people; now Steinberg wanted to ask what they had done. Even success, it turned out, had another email waiting for it.