[Wikimedia-l] Banners are too bright, too long

[Matthew Roth]

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 3:04 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:

>
>
> Zack Exley wrote:
> > Tens of thousands of donors have filled out a survey this year after
> donating.
> > We've gotten hardly a handful of complaints. I would have expected a lot.
>
> Can you elaborate on this point? You seem to be saying that you would have
> expected a lot of complaints from people who are filling out a voluntary
> survey after having willingly donated money to you. Just how many
> complaints
> were you expecting and what might they look like? I'm fascinated to know.
>


I don't know what Zack was expecting this year, but having worked on the
fundraiser last year, the banners were talked about so extensively that
they became the topic of numerous blog posts at large outlets. The Brandon
Harris one even got him to an IAMA on Reddit. They were very much mocking
the left orientation and the easy way you could screen shot the photo over
a Wikipedia article title to make an insult. It was not that much fun to
read when you were investing a lot of time  and energy on the effort, so I
think some of us were not looking forward to the same happening this year.

Now that I monitor social media for the Foundation, I get to see a lot of
chatter around the banner. I don't mean to suggest Tweets are proof of
anything definitively, but of the ten thousand+ Wikipedia tweets since Nov
15, I've only seen a small handful of them (I would guess less than 20)
that mentioned the yellow banners negatively. I haven't monitored every
single tweet of course, so if someone wants to be more scientific about it,
please do.  A search on Twitter for "yellow banner" does bring up some of
those negative ones, but it's not a huge list.

FWIW,
Matthew


-- 

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
+1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
www.wikimediafoundation.org
*https://donate.wikimedia.org*