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" <zex...@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@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l