I know the Italian Chapter, the online fundraising team, and community liaisons have been talking about solutions for a while and I won’t get in the way of that, but I thought I would offer a few ideas on some of the online organizing tactics being discussed here. This probably falls in the category of unsolicited advice and it might be bad advice at that. To quote a good song, “It’s bad advice only if you use it.”
On the topic of limiting impressions, I agree that the fundraising use case is different than WLM organizing. I am still fairly sure that there has to something more effective than running a full-time banner for a month. It would take testing a bunch of ideas to figure that out and Central Notice has much more capacity now to test different things. We are happy to help brainstorm ideas for that if anyone wanted.
I understand that WLM’s has a common organizing challenge in that it’s a couple step process for participation. Would it make sense to prioritize a “Sign up” or “Enter the Contest” feature on the landing pages that asks people to submit their email addresses, so that you can followup with them? I mention this because online fundraising has experimented with a “Remind me later” feature on mobile where we have people enter their email addresses, so that we can send them a followup fundraising email. It has had some good results. It seems like having email addresses for followup would help keep people engaged in WLM and you could also reach out to them next year.
Lastly, we could add an appeal to participate in WLM to the thank you email we send to donors in Italy. We would be happy to do it, if it’s useful.
Best regards,
Lisa
On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 5:20 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
This is not the first time this conflict appears, but this is the worst outcome ever so far. In all the years I have been asking for an explanation why it is not possible to move it, or why it is urgently to do it in September, nothing reasonable has been provided for that. Nothing in all those years.
If a fundraising banner has a big negative influence on a project, I think it is time to have the community involved and have them speak out what they think about the situation. As FR only speaks to a few people, they seem to have the impression that they can freely decide without taking the community in account. I think it will be time to have the community speak out what they think in a request for comment/voting or something on Meta. Anyone an idea or the experience how to set such up?
Romaine
2015-08-20 13:26 GMT+02:00 MF-Warburg mfwarburg@googlemail.com:
Which is Fundraising's point? I haven't seen anything here about why WMF
so
urgently needs to request Italian donations in September. Am 20.08.2015 07:27 schrieb "Risker" risker.wp@gmail.com:
I can understand the frustration that members of WMIT are expressing
here,
but I also see Fundraising's point. I wonder if there are not some
other
options that could be considered. For example, instead of a banner, perhaps a big bright button on the sidebar that says "Upload images for Wiki Loves Monuments here!" may be technically feasible. It's not
quite
the equivalent of a banner, but it does address the wayfinding issue at least. (I think that's possibly the biggest downside of not having the
WLM
banners in rotation.)
Let's give ourselves permission to think outside the box a bit here;
both
of these activities are valuable and important to our movement, each of them have different but viable reasons for wanting to proceed during
that
specific period. There are a lot of smart people reading this mailing
list.
I'd like to think between the several-hundred of us we might be able to come up with a solution that works to accommodate both groups.
Risker/Anne
On 20 August 2015 at 01:19, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com
wrote:
Yes, Andrew is right. Navigation is a very important focus point of organising every Wiki Loves Monuments.
The complexity of the navigation is that MediaWiki and the whole
group
of
Wikimedia wikis is not designed for navigation, but designed for
showing
content. In the past eight years small improvements have been made in
this
field, but in general speaking it is still not easy to navigate for
the
majority of the people.
Romaine
2015-08-19 20:45 GMT+02:00 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
I think Andrew is right: the WLM banner serves as a pointer, and
it's
very
easy to remember "go on Wikipedia and click into the banner on the
top".
It's much more difficult to remember the strange name of the
contest
(in
Italy it's still called "Wiki Loves Monuments", even if it's
English).
And of course we do not have good analytics for the banner: nobody
knows
homw many page views there are in a single wiki per day, so we
cannot
count
the clickthroughs (which we have as the link is on a WLM landing
page).
Aubrey
On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Andrew Gray <
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk>
wrote:
On 19 August 2015 at 14:26, Sam Klein sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu
wrote:
> There's a more general problem here we should fix: > > We already know that effectiveness of any single banner drops
off
> dramatically after the first few views. So there's rarely a
reason
to
run > a continuous banner -- certainly not if there are other banners
to
run.
I think we should be cautious about using our fundraising
experience
to predict the efficiency of 'delayed call-to-action' banners
like
WLM
- to my mind they seem to function in quite different roles.
The fundraising banner is calling for an immediate action. You
see
it,
and you either donate or you don't. If you decide not to donate,
you
probably won't decide to donate on seeing it tomorrow, either;
while
if you have donated, you're probably not going to donate again.
So
the
banner being repeated doesn't gain us much, and it has
progressively
less value on the third, fourth, fifth appearances. There are relatively few people who see a fundraising banner and decide
"I'll
sleep on it", then come back tomorrow and donate. And if they
*do*,
well - there's a donate link on every page, once they're looking
for
it.
However, WLM is calling for a delayed action - "go off, do
something,
and come back again to tell us about it".
The most desired outcome is probably that a previously uninvolved person will see it, click through, think "that sounds fun", and
go
off
to take some photos - after all, it's running all month, they can
do
it at the weekend. A few days later they come back, and want to
upload
their photos... but if the banner's not there on Wikipedia, they
won't
really know where to go. They might not remember the name ("Wiki something?"), making it hard to search for the contest, and they probably didn't bookmark the WLM pages. There isn't anything else
on
the page that would help to take them there, and if they're not involved in the projects already they probably won't know where
the
information's likely to be. If we can't make sure they can find
WLM
easily when they return, then we've wasted the original call to action, we've wasted the potential contributions, *and*, most importantly, we've wasted their time and goodwill.
I think this difference in intended response styles makes it hard
to
generalise from the "diminishing returns" experienced on
fundraising.
Yes, a repeated banner will get progressively diminishing clickthroughs. But with WLM, those second clickthroughs in some
ways
provide the "value" to the first clickthrough - they need to
return
to
make the campaign a success, which isn't really a concern for fundraising. We need to make sure that that channel is open and visible in some way when they come back.
Andrew.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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