On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
This is an interesting idea, and makes a lot of sense. Non-English fundraising hasn't really had the attention it needs in previous years (for obvious reasons - it's more efficient to focus your attention where you can achieve the most) and this should make a big difference.
I'm curious, as you do more and more testing each year and a shorter and shorter fundraiser, how much of the total are you expecting to come from testing? I was looking at the stats yesterday and, if I was reading it correctly, the recent tests have been raising about as much per day as the main 2010 fundraiser did.
Yes, as we test more, more money comes in outside of the campaign period. It is still a small amount in proportion. But tests make just as much per banner view as the actual fundraiser in general.
As we get closer the fundraiser we test more and more. For several months we limited ourselves to one hour per week. Then we went up to two. And since Nov 15 (last year's launch date) we figured we could get away with more. So we went to 3 or sometimes more. But usually the tests are only in one or a few countries at a time.
This year we did something different and went up all over the world for 24 hours on Nov 15 as sort of a dress rehearsal. That really helped us to identify a lot of little things to fix. It also brought in two million dollars -- our biggest day ever, by far. That gave us the confidence to launch much later this year.
On Nov 26, 2012 7:11 AM, "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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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