PledgeBank for CiviCRM - Original Proposal

Draft Proposal - Seeking Feedback mySociety - the organization that developed and runs PledgeBank - is looking at creating a component for CiviCRM that would provide integrated PledgeBank functionality for organizations using CiviCRM. They are very interested in getting feedback from the CiviCRM community regarding level of interest and functionality - and would like to engage with organizations who might act as beta testers/pilot users. You can add comments to this page, continue the discussion on the Developer Mailing List, or send mail directly to Heather Cronk (heather at pledgebank dot com) if you're interested in being a pilot site.

PledgeBank is a powerful tool for encouraging people to take action and to positively pressure their friends, family, and neighbors to join them. The site has been up and running for 2.5 years, and has a solid track record of providing individuals with a way to pledge to take action, and to bring others along with them. This is a proposal to build a full, integrated PledgeBank module for CiviCRM, which will allow administrators to create conditional pledges of the form, "I will do X but only if N people will do X too," - for example, "I will vote in the next presidental election but only if 25 young American adults will do the same" or "I will donate my clothes and shoes that don't fit me or that I haven't worn in the past 3 months to a local homeless shelter but only if 10 other people will do the same."

Though the site has been successful in providing a platform for individuals to create change in communities all over the world, it has not yet taken off with the nonprofit sector. Because many nonprofits need organizing tools to integrate with platforms and systems such as CRMs and CMSs, PledgeBank has been operating primarily at the individual level. And because of PledgeBank's current privacy policy, nonprofits that have used the site have been unable to capture information about pledge signers, such as name and email address. However, the team behind PledgeBank ( mySociety.org) is interested in developing a CRM module that will allow nonprofits to use PledgeBank to provide supporters with ways to take action where they live, work, study, and play...and to retain important information about those supporters that will allow organizations to continue interacting with them.

PledgeBank follows a very simple formula. When users create a pledge, they indicate what action they want to take, how many people they need to make that action successful, and a date by which they need people to sign the pledge. While individuals have been using the site for over two years to raise money for neighborhood projects, march against war, draft candidates into political races, make their homes more environmentally friendly, and loads of other great things. The real value-added piece of PledgeBank's system is that it ensures that good ideas get a platform and that no one who wants to do good in the world has to act alone. And we would like to extend the functionality of the site to nonprofit organizations that can build on the great work that individuals across the globe have been doing.

In thinking about a PledgeBank plug-in for CiviCRM, we realize that one of the important features for any nonprofit is integration with existing CRM and CMS. Keeping that in mind, we have a few ideas for how the positive peer pressure and distributed organizing tools available via PledgeBank could be make available to the CiviCRM community via a plug-in developed by mySociety. CiviCRM clients can create pledges via a user account in the main CiviCRM system, and serve as administrators of those pledges. CiviPledge will serve as the engine for pledges, allowing administrators to use existing CiviCRM functions in tandem with CiviPledge, such as:

• CiviMail to send confirmation, encouragement, success, and failure emails, as well as emails to survey whether or not signers actually did what they pledged to do (in addition to all of CiviMail's current functionality, such as click-through monitoring)
• CiviEvent to automatically create events in the correct location when enough people sign the pledge, as well as automatically registering the pledge signers as attendees
• CiviContribute to make it easy for signers of financially-oriented to donate once the pledge is successful, and for all conversions to be tracked
• CiviMember to auto-fill fields, track pledge signers, and collect information in order to continue building a membership list

CiviPledge would have a page like http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Main+Manage+Events+Page for setting up pledge text, deadline, target, etc. It would be entirely contained within CiviCRM and not link to PledgeBank.com, in order to ensure privacy for users. The primary benefit to CiviCRM clients would be a tool for administrators to create and edit pledges, and to manage email traffic to pledge signers - all fully integrated with the CiviCRM systems they're already utilizing