[Wikimedia-l] Fundraiser launch update

[Zack Exley]

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