Technically we deployed this feature over two months ago, but not very well so we didn’t have much fanfare. It was one of our daily UVIs (@beemuvi) and we mentioned it in a beemail.
The feature itself is pretty self-explanatory: In the Settings for a goal you can add supporters — friends, family, enemies — who will get cc’d on your legit check emails if you derail. It’s a bit like StickK’s referees but we don’t currently ask anything of them. Still, just having them in the loop may be additional incentive to stay on your yellow brick road.
One reason we were worried about shouting this from the mountaintops until now is that we hadn’t implemented opt-in from the supporters. We just warned/begged you to let these poor people know what was up so they wouldn’t spambox us the first time they were CC’d on one of these derailment emails. Now we send something like this to someone when you add them as a supporter:
Subject: someone wants you to help (bee)mind them
Beeminder user So And So — check out their goal gallery at http://beeminder.com/example — put down your email address as a person they want keeping an extra eye on them. You should ask that person what this is all about, and opt in to this by hitting this link: [confirmation link here]
If neither of you know what this is about then please reply “NOT ME” and we’ll figure out what happened.
Thanks, and happy beeminding!
As a bonus, if you’ve weasel-proofed a goal that has supporters and you want to reply to a legit check email that a derailment wasn’t legitimate, you can have your supporters chime in to corroborate your story.
Image credit: Zazzle
Thanks to Sam Grossberg and Tee Mang, and of course StickK, for suggesting this feature. Sandy Maguire also provided inspiration when, during NaNoWriMo, he put a call out on Facebook that if he derailed he’d pay $50 to the person who had kicked him in the pants the most, where that was defined as bugging him when his Beeminder graph was in the red.