Thanks!
2012/11/27 Zack Exley zexley@wikimedia.org
One more thing I should have mentioned: We'll still be testing from time to time around the world during the rest of November and December. So don't be alarmed if you see banners up. We're still actively trying to improve donation processing and translations everywhere.
So far this has been going really well. I know that in some ways the banners seem more agressive this year. (But they are only 90-120px tall on most screens, vs 172px last year!) But we're on track to having a radically shorter fundraiser.
We're also hoping to experiment with turning banners off for people after they've seen them a certain number of times (probably 5 times). If we can do that without slowing down the fundraiser, we'll make that a new feature of the campaign.
On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Zack Exley zexley@wikimedia.org wrote:
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
-- Zack Exley Chief Revenue Officer Wikimedia Foundation 415 506 9225 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l