How easy does your page make it to say yes? Answer about a dozen quick questions and get a score for six parts of the backer's decision, your biggest obstacle, and what to change first.
A backer decides in seconds, usually on a phone, with little information. This check looks at how easy your page makes that decision, using ideas from behavioral economics: how choices are presented, what other people appear to be doing, how much uncertainty is left, and how the request is framed. It is built for donation and reward campaigns, before launch or while live.
It scores six parts. Each one is a way a decision gets easier or harder:
Every answer maps to points from 0 to 100. Answers inside a part are averaged (some count for more), and the six parts are then combined using weights that depend on your campaign type and stage. A pre-launch campaign is not marked down for having no backers yet, and a donation campaign is not asked about reward tiers.
The result is not a chance of success. It is a diagnostic: it shows where a backer is most likely to hesitate. Two parts matter in particular because more is not always better: framing, and scarcity. A middle answer can beat an extreme one, and made-up urgency scores zero.
Questions you skip are left out of the score instead of counted as zero. The page tells you how many answers your score is based on.
Not yet. Those campaigns involve investment decisions and regulation that this check does not model, so version 1 covers donation and reward campaigns only.
Because a real deadline or a genuinely limited run can help people decide, while manufactured pressure damages trust. The check rewards honest, explained limits and scores invented ones at zero.
No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere. We only count, anonymously and with your cookie consent, that the tool was used.
Yes. After your results, the "Try a change" panel lets you switch on your top fixes and see how the score would move. It shows the direction of improvement, not a forecast of how much more you would raise.
The framework draws on these studies, among others:
Most of this research is observational or comes from specific settings, so we use it to shape the questions, not to promise outcomes. See the full Pledgescore methodology for how our other score works.