Looks like the message missed this list. While I'm at it, I've asked a question on the translation system at https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AFundraising_2012&dif...

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-------- Messaggio originale -------- Oggetto: [Wikimedia-l] Fundraiser launch update Data: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 23:10:52 -0800 Mittente: Zack Exley zexley@wikimedia.org

Hi all,

We have some information on the fundraiser launch to share. We are still planning on launching Monday, November 26, but we're going to make a change this year in the timing of campaigns around the world.

Every year, as we get closer to the launch date, we test more frequently and discover new messages and designs that make the fundraiser much more efficient (i.e. more money per day, shorter fundraiser, fewer and/or smaller banners).

In the past couple weeks, we've discovered some new designs and messages that we believe will let us shorten the fundraiser by a lot -- *and* make the banners much smaller than they've typically been.

But we don't have time to adapt these to all the countries and languages in the world right away. This has pushed us to do something we've known is the right thing to do for some time.

We're going to run this end of year campaign only in 5 countries (US, CA, GB, AU & NZ) and then spend three months meticulously localizing and translating (and testing for new purely local messages) before running the global campaign in all other counties, in which our best messages and designs developed in December will be used across the world.

We will use the time over the next month to run short tests of various messages and payment options in other languages and countries in preparation for the global campaign that we'll run in April. So people in the five-country campaign will still only see a campaign once a year (in December). And people in all other countries will still only see a campaign once a year (in April).

*Everyone, everywhere will only see one campaign per year* -- unless they happen to travel from, say, the US in December to India in April.

We're excited about breaking the campaign up for several reasons. Over the next month, we will be able to focus on testing and finding the best messages. The new "Facts" banners have opened up more testing possibilites for us, and we'll learn a lot about our messages in the next month, while we can test 24 hours per day. We'll use the lessons learned from the December five-country campaign and spend the next three months applying them correctly and testing multiple versions in other languages and countries.

What we've learned over the past few years is that the same messages tend to win all over the world. But that translating short, colloquial fundraising messages takes a long time and many translators to get right. And we're finding a new "best" message basically every day. We don't think it's good if only English readers are getting our best messages.

So overall, we think we'll be able to run both the English banners and the multilingual banners better by breaking up the campaign.

Our volunteer translators have already done a ton of work translating our current best messages -- and we are very thankful! We're using all of those translations now, in our testing and they will be the basis of the April campaign. We will be engaging the community of volunteers, donors and readers even more in the coming months to optimize the translations of the new messages and ramp up testing in various languages. Moreover, there are technical updates to the translation system that we'll be able to use during the April campaign that are not released yet.

We are looking forward to more of our readers receiving better messages and donation experiences in countries around the world.

More info to come! Instead of replying to this thread, please comment on the Fundraiser 2012 meta discussion page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2012

Zack & Megan, WMF fundraising _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l