[Wikimedia-l] Fundraiser launch update

[Zack Exley]

One more thing I should have mentioned: We'll still be testing from time to
time around the world during the rest of November and December. So don't be
alarmed if you see banners up. We're still actively trying to improve
donation processing and translations everywhere.

So far this has been going really well. I know that in some ways the
banners seem more agressive this year. (But they are only 90-120px tall on
most screens, vs 172px last year!) But we're on track to having a radically
shorter fundraiser.

We're also hoping to experiment with turning banners off for people after
they've seen them a certain number of times (probably 5 times). If we can
do that without slowing down the fundraiser, we'll make that a new feature
of the campaign.


On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:10 PM, 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
>



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