These days, when you think of mySociety’s major projects, you’d be forgiven for passing over the vision in purple that is Pledgebank.

And yet, it’s among mySociety’s longest-running sites, and one that we had big plans for. It was a truly international project, too, with users in many countries.

It even, as we’ll see, spawned one of the UK’s major transparency organisations.

But all good things come to an end, and as we announced in a recent post, we’ll shortly be closing Pledgebank down.

Before we do, it seems a good moment to record some of its history.

The Pledgebank concept

In November 2004, we announced mySociety’s second official project:

The purpose of  PledgeBank is to get people past a barrier which strikes down endless good plans before they can are carried out – the fear of acting alone. It allows anyone to say “I’ll do X if other people also do X”, for example “I’ll write to my councillor if 5 other people on my street do the same”.

However, there is no scale to big or too small, it could equally be used to say “I’ll start recycling if 10,000 other people in Britain also start”.

Pledgebank officially launched on 13 June 2005. We’d opened a trial version of the site to a few users first, with early pledges including anti-ID card campaigning, carbon offsetting, and community river cleaning. People were interested. It was off to a good start. As the Guardian reported, even Brian Eno was a user.

By that September, mySociety Director Tom was describing Pledgebank as our most popular site yet, and as of January 2006, there had been more than 200 successful pledges. In July 2006 the site won the New Statesman New Media award.

Finding a niche for Pledgebank

So that was all going swimmingly, and as time passed, we started building on the basic Pledgebank model.

There were location-specific Pledgebanks, like Pledgebank London which urged folk to do a good deed for their city. Both the then PM Tony Blair and Mayor of London Ken Livingstone helped launch it, pledging to become patrons of a sports club.

And, like FixMyStreet, we sold Pledgebank as white-label software for councils, allowing them to organise, for example, community snow clearance, and Royal Wedding street parties.

Did we miss something?

Here at mySociety, we’re not all about making the big bucks. But that doesn’t stop us from occasionally wondering why we never evolved Pledgebank into a lucrative service like Kickstarter or Groupon, both of which are founded on the very same idea: that there’s potential power in a pledge.

Whether you back a project on Kickstarter, or put in for a hot stone massage on Groupon, you’re basically undertaking to buy something. But while Pledgebank did allow fundraising pledges, it didn’t take a cut of the moneys raised.

At one point we did look into using an escrow service, but we decided in the end that each pledge organiser could sort out collection of any payments. And thus, we never quite became Kickstarter. Oh well.

Simple concepts have many possibilities

Pledgebank might have been founded on a simple concept, but, like so many simple concepts, it turned out that there were endless features we could add to it.

At launch, SMS text messages were an important part of the site, and one that we spent considerable time and effort on. It was 2005, remember, and as we often said in our blog posts at the time, many people either weren’t online or had no desire to be. We wanted the site to cater for them too.

And almost immediately after launch we added another feature: the ability to subscribe, so you’d receive an email when someone set up a pledge that was near you, geographically. This was ideal for those pledges with a local aspect, such as saving an ancient tree, or getting together to clean up a community.

Then there was the international aspect. Pledgebank was mySociety’s first in-house project to be translated.

In true mySociety style, the translation was crowdsourced and ultimately overseen by our diligent volunteer Tim Morley. As I write, just prior to the site’s closure, it is available in 14 languages, from Simplified Chinese to Belarusian, and including Esperanto.

And it was taken up, enthusiastically, in many countries. Even now, we still sometimes have to deploy Google Translate in order to reply to Pledgebank’s user support emails.

A site to change the world

Over its lifetime, Pledgebank has been the starting point for many people to make the world a better place, in ways both large and small.

Before we say goodbye all together, let’s take a look at some of the surprising, sometimes amazing, things it helped bring about.

• In what was probably Pledgebank’s biggest success, over 1,000 people donated to bring about the creation of ‘an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK’: that organisation became the Open Rights Group.
• After the Croydon riots, more than 1,000 people chipped in to rebuild the damaged Reeve’s furniture store.
• Football fans raised over £20,000 for Ebbsfleet United, so that they could buy striker Michael Gash.
• A pledge encouraging bloggers to post about women in technology on Ada Lovelace Day saw almost double the number of pledgers they’d hoped for.
• Australian massage therapists raised the funds to travel to New Orleans and offer therapy to those who needed it in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
• People from all over the world donated books and money to build a library in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.
• 1,000 people pledged to move house and start a Free State community in New Hampshire.
• Hundreds of orphans in Liberia received clean underwear.
• Over £2,000 was given to plant trees in Kenya.

The smaller pledges were sometimes just as interesting:

• A pianist played a free jazz concert at Guy’s Hospital, in return for others pledging to have the hospital’s piano tuned.
• 15 people engaged in earnest conversation with someone whose views they really despised, to try to understand them more.
• As noted in this BBC article on the site launch, several people buried a bucket to create a home for stag beetles.

…and many more. Over time, Pledgebank became an archive of inspirational, utopian, and sometimes plain eccentric pledges. It brought thousands of people together in common causes, and multiplied the power of a single person’s desire to do good.

We’d love to hear how you used Pledgebank: let us know in the comments below.