[Wikimedia-l] Fundraising updates?

[James Salsman]

Hi Zack,

Thanks very much for your updates:

> What saved us was taking text from the personal appeals and putting it into
> the banner itself. These banners did very well. These new message-driven
> banners are what made us split the campaign in two -- because we knew we
> were going to develop a lot of new messages and not have time to translate
> them well....

As you know I've been saying for years that the variance among the
volunteer-supplied messages, originally submitted in 2009 and hundreds
of which have not yet been tested (as far as I know), was large enough
to suggest that some messages would certainly outperform the
traditional banners and appeals. While it's refreshing to be
validated, as you might imagine I feel like Cassandra much of the time
for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying mathematical
reasoning involved.

The last time I heard from you, you said that you intended to test the
untried messaging from 2009 with multivariate analysis. However,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Breakthrough
shows only three very small-N multivariate tests, the last of which
was in October, and no recent testing.

Do you still intend to test the untried volunteer-submitted messages
with multivariate analysis? If so, when? Thank you.

Sincerely,
James Salsman