[Wikimedia-l] Fundraiser launch update

[Thomas Dalton]

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.
On Nov 26, 2012 7:11 AM, "Zack Exley" <zexley at 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 at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
>