PledgeHammer, Keep Your Promises or Pay the Consequences
Posted: Thursday 19 Mar 2009, under category Ideas
Lacking the motivation required to maintain your promise or resolution? Pledge Hammer offers a possible solution. The site works like this: you make a pledge, say, to quit smoking, and set a deadline. Then you pledge an amount of money to forfeit to a charity of your choice should you not maintain your promise. You make any kind of pledge you want, from life-changing commitments to small, mundane I-promise-to-clean-my-room type stuff.
On the site you can browse previous pledges, many of which, as you might expect, are not entirely serious. Examples: three of the latest the pledges are to run a marathon in by December 31st 2009, to fall in love with someone new who is not "person R" by August 31st 2009, to acheive financial freedom by June 31st 2009. The amounts pledged are 100$ for the marathon, 50 EEK for the falling in love (about 4 or 5 dollars US, love is cheap...), 5,000 euros for the financial freedom.
Pledge Hammer seems to be entirely founded on the honor system, i.e. their is nothing but personal honor requiring people to actually pay up for failing to reach their goal. It seems rather unlikely that someone who habitally breaks promises would choose to keep a pledge to website (and who, having failed to get financial freedom, is going to shell out 5,000 of money they apparently don't have?). But it is a nice idea, and could catch on.
Via InventorSpot
