How your score is actually computed.

01The score is math, not a black box

Every question in the quiz maps to a fixed point value. Your answers get summed into a single 0–100 total. There's no model in the loop deciding what your number should "feel like" — the same answers always produce the exact same score, every time, for anyone.

That determinism is the point. It's what makes the score something you can actually act on: fix one specific thing, re-answer that one question, re-score, and watch the exact number move. If the score were an AI's holistic impression, you couldn't isolate what moved it.

02The 9 readiness factors

Your Campaign Readiness Assessment starts by asking what stage your campaign is at — Early, Mid, or Late — because what "ready" looks like is genuinely different at each stage. From there, 9 weighted factors build your score: 6 asked of every campaign, and 3 swapped in to match your stage, so you're never judged against a bar that doesn't apply to you yet.

Plus 3 more, specific to your stage — for example, an Early-stage campaign is scored on concept validation and execution capacity, a Mid-stage campaign on content readiness and reward-tier structure, and a Late-stage campaign on page conversion and launch-week momentum. Each stage-specific factor is worth 10 points, for 30 more — 112 possible points in total, normalized to your 0–100 score.

The paid Campaign Improvement Plan doesn't re-ask any of this — it's generated directly from the same assessment, so the number and the report always agree.

03Where the AI actually comes in

Once your score exists, Pledgescore's AI tool reads your specific answers — your funding goal, your category, what you told us about your story and audience — and writes the parts that require judgment and language, not arithmetic: what your particular gaps mean, a rewritten hook for your specific campaign, the exact funding math for your numbers, a pre-launch plan dated to your launch window.

Pledgescore's AI tool never starts from a blank page and never invents your score — it's always working forward from a number that already exists before it writes a single word.

04Validated against real outcomes

We checked the scoring system against 1,000+ real, completed campaigns — comparing what the model would have said before launch to what actually happened once the campaign ran. It's right about 76% of the time: a meaningful signal, though not a guarantee for any single campaign.

05Why we're telling you this

AI is genuinely good at reading a lot of specific context and writing tailored, useful advice from it. It's not particularly good at being a fair, consistent judge applying the same rule to everyone the same way — so we don't ask it to be one. The judging part is fixed math you could recompute by hand from your own answers. The writing part is AI, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.