Pledgebank

MySociety’s Tom Steinberg and a bunch of other savvy people recently launched The Pledgebank. The idea behind the Pledgebank is simple:

You wanna change something, say, you’d like to start recycling more thoroughly in your neighborhood. But you only wanna do it if another 50 people do the same thing, ’cause what’s the point otherwise. So what you do is: Go to pledgebank.com, pledge to start recycling but only if 50 other people start recycling, too! Neat idea!

From a campaigning point of view, there are a series of features which are simple, but really smart:

• You can contact your fellow pledgers via email and SMS.
• It aims at local initiatives: Stay small, work with your neighbors!
• A tool lets you design flyers on the website to be printed. So even without being layout-savvy, you get some decent-looking flyers to spread the word.

This is a whole little campaign toolset, connecting online and offline campaigning. Simple to use, yet efficient. Also, it’s already available in a lot of different languages. We need more like this!