[Wikimedia-l] Fundraiser launch update

[Zack Exley]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 3:36 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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 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
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> >
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-- 
Zack Exley
Chief Revenue Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
415 506 9225