Awooga! Awooga!

For pretty well the last week now I’ve been adding various new messages and alerts to PledgeBank. First up were a set of emails which go to creators. Two of these are “chivvying” ones, which remind the creator to do publicity, and give them some advice.

Quite a few people make pledges and don’t realise that they have to publicise them themselves. Ambient traffic to PledgeBank will get you some sign ups, especially at the start of last week when we had lots of media attention, but pledge creator’s also have to do some of their own work. So we chivvy the creator once after a few days if they don’t have many sign ups.

Secondly, even if you’ve got some publicity and some signups, sometimes you just haven’t got a high enough rate to reach your target on time. I’ve added some code which checks signup rate on average over the last week (for pledges at least a week old). If things were to carry on at that rate until the deadline, and the pledge still wouldn’t succeed, it sends an email with ideas about publicity/marketing of your pledge. Now we just have to hope this is useful rather than annoying…

Another thing we noticed is that lots of pledge creators hadn’t sent a message to their signers after their pledge succeeded. Admittedly this was partly because of a bug in our announce message code (there was no action= in one of the forms, which caused problems on some browsers). So I also added a successful pledge reminder email which is sent a few days after success.

All the stuff above was done using the nice “message” tables which Chris made a while ago. They make it easy to send messages which go out only once, and to creators, signers and late signers as appropriate. However, for the next set of emails, some new code was needed. These are optional “alerts”. For example, to email you when new comments are added to a pledge, and when there is a new local pledge in your area. So, the last day or two I’ve been coding that.