It’s evolved a bit since then — both in terms of what’s actually at Lovebomb.me and in terms of some additional mockups that Jess put together for what it could become.

But while it’s already on the right track, what we want to do is further evolve it, into something a bit more polished and broadly approachable, which could satisfy the following three objectives — and launch for Mother’s Day:

1) Provide an approachable, fun onramp into our learning offerings
2) Teach a little bit (and possibly more) of code, without being too scary for a non-coder
3) Grow our base of supporters

Michelle Levesque and I did some brainstorming this week, and here’s what we started to come up with on where it should go from here. A basic framework (along with plenty of outstanding questions) is below — whattaya think?

–  Take Jess’s “<3 Generator” mockup as the starting point. (Concept #2 in this post.)

– Have a few more initial templates the user could choose from (some themed around Mother’s Day, for launch)

– Have the main creation go as follows:

1. Allow the user to click on elements of the card to change them (as in the mockup). This would allow the user to edit without actually directly altering code, but would show the code surrounding the element. Ideally, this would also include Atul’s positioning add-on to allow people to easily move elements around on the page.
2. Have the right-hand 1/3 of the page show the lovebomb’s code as it stands (updating as elements are edited as in step 1)
3. Have key page elements highlighted in the code (colors & fonts, in particular), so a user could click on the highlighted piece of code and choose from a drop-down menu of options and see the love bomb updated immediately.

– The code editor should be easily hidden, and we should be able to govern based on a URL parameter whether or not it’s initially visible by default. This would allow us to tailor the initial “cody-ness” of a user’s experience, so that those coming in through less technical channels (e.g. a tweet from @Firefox or the FF & You newsletter) can still have something that’s approachable.

– Once published, we should provide the current menu of options to publish, as well, hopefully, as a direct “email this lovebomb” ask that then allows us to have an email signup checkbox (this could be integrated with a BSD share form or something?).

– We should add a persistent email signup as a footer, like in some of Jess’s other mockups.

– And we should create a directory/gallery of people’s lovebomb’s, so that others can see what’s been done and build off of it.

Some outstanding things to think through:

– What code, precisely, do we display around each element when someone clicks to edit? Is it too imposing if we expose the text as well as the html and css that govern the element?, since the css is what contains that actual words that people will see (colors, underline, etc). Perhaps we could make it so that when you hover over any bit of the css, there’ll be an explanation of what it is? Or we could build in dropdowns/menus to allow you to change the formatting without changing the code, but that then show you the resulting change in the code?

– What are we actually calling this? We don’t want “Lovebomb” to be what this goes broadly with, but it’s not like it’s an card maker, either. Any thoughts, internet?

– How well can we integrate email signup as an action, so that we’re able to keep users engaged and move them further along in learning after they make their love bomb? Anything we’re missing besides figuring out an integration at the end and having it as a persistent footer?

2012 online donations to Mozilla: 3,723
2012 online revenue: $78,657.80
Current @Mozilla followers: 4,880
Current email subscribers: 292,263

These are pretty great numbers. We don’t expect them to hold at this clip on their own, but it’s a very promising start to the year.

So, what’s next? Well, we’ve got a few things on the docket:

• Next week, we’ll be launching a new push for the Firefox/I support Mozilla t-shirts we have. We’ll be testing two different asks: “Donate $30 or more and get a t-shirt” vs. “Make a monthly donation of $5 or more and get a t-shirt“. We’ll be emailing the Join list about this campaign a couple of times, and we’re also planning to be in social media, email, and snippet channels on the Firefox side next month.
• Either this month or next, we’ll be launching a monthly webmakers newsletter, to spread the word about the awesome progress that’s being made with and connected to Mozilla projects
• Next month, we’re planning an engagement campaign around our Hackasaurus project, to get people a bit more familiar with it.
• We’re working on figuring out ways to onboard people into our learning initiatives in fun, low-bar ways, while still imparting a bit of coding goodness. The Hackasaurus team has created an early version of something called the “love bomb” maker, which we’re working to build up into something that we can push more widely later in the year (and which will likely not be called the “love bomb” upon actual launch . Matt Thompson wrote up a great post on the Love Bomb — just in time for Valentine’s Day — here.
• And the other big thing that we’re all monitoring is ACTA. Mitchell Baker blogged on it this morning, and we’ll definitely be keeping our eyes peeled as the debate moves forward with ways for us to constructively and meaningfully engage.

Mozilla Japan Scratch/Hackasaurus Pop up. Photo from Mark Surman

Michelle Thorne has already done a bunch of thinking about how this maps across our events — her event menu is here — and I’m trying to think about what type of infrastructure we’ll need to set up to get people to organize these types of things on their own (with our support, or course).

There are some pretty clear functionalities that are needed, which Michelle has laid out elsewhere, beyond simple event creation & categorization — localization, data portability & access, good developer APIs, participant email capture, and more.

In addition to those, there are a couple that seem necessary to me to be reasonably effective:

–Ability for event organizers to organize over time: This means an ability to create an event (on one or many days or several events in a series) and have the ability to directly communicate, over time (so both before and after the event) with the people who sign up to take part.

Most tools — even those with something like this — seem to lack either the ability to communicate with attendees at all, or, even if they have that, lack the ability to do so over time and across events. Example: I want to start a weekly meetup. Within the Mozilla event infrastructure, I should be able to create an event once and set it to happen every week at Time X. I should be able to change the event time of a given week. People should be able to sign up for one/all/some of those events. And I should be able to communicate with all the attendees (who have opted in to communications, of course) both before and after the events.

–Groups: Part of this whole thing needs to be people easily finding and joining groups of people they’d want to talk to — that could be based on geography, ability, program, interest, whatever. These should be easy to search for, find, and join, and allow people to discuss things and move forward in their own way. This could be anything from glorified listservs to something more Facebook-y, but it’s definitely important for fostering an engaged core of people doing this stuff.

Now, there are examples of organizations doing things like this — or at least setting up infrastructure close to it — quite successfully. From Rebuild the Dream to Code Year to Tedx and a whole lot more, they’re out there, but generally there’s something making each not quite what we need, or not quite what would work in this context.

So the questions are as follows:

1) Is the description of needed functionality above correct? Are there gaping holes, or things that aren’t necessary?
2) How should we create that infrastructure?

There are platforms out there which meet some, but not all, needs. There’s Meetup Everywhere, but what’s really needed is a combo of Meetup Everywhere with the richer functionality you can have as an individual user of Meetup. 350.org is building its own tool in the open, which could potentially be forked for our needs — https://github.com/350org/localpower. There are tools that don’t yet exist (ex: http://www.controlshiftlabs.com/) and then there’s the better known tools from BSD to Action Kit to EventBrite to Lanyrd and more. BSD is what we use for other things, but their event tool unfortunately wouldn’t localize too well. Otherwise it would have almost everything else.

So, what say you, techies, organizers, people who care? Please chime in with thoughts on any of this — or thoughts on anyone else I should try and talk with — in comments. Thanks!

Also, many thanks to, among others, Jim Pugh & Nathan Woodhull for recent discussions that have helped crystallize my thinking enough to get to where I currently find it.

The biggest piece of the EOY campaign was the animated video we put together which can be seen at http://mozilla.org/story. The numbers discussed below all refer to pushes to that page, though about $40k in additional donations came in through the Join page, the t-shirt campaign, and others.

Along the way, there were pushes from all major Firefox channels, along with frequent promotions to our own base of supporters.

For us, the biggest takeaway from the results of this campaign is that when we’re in channel with a chance to tell our story in an understandable way, we can be successful – even with a not-yet-initiated audience.

However, we also saw that the more space & time we had to tell that story, the more successful we were: our own emails, which featured a multi-part arc, were the most successful channel in terms of dollars raised per impression, followed by the FF email list, with the snippet and social media behind. Interestingly, the snippet was far more successful overall than social media, which does track with the results most organizations see when trying to fundraise directly on Facebook and Twitter. While social media can be an effective tool for many things, fundraising effectively on it remains a not-yet-perfected art.

Going a step further, here’s what’s contained in this report:

• Top-line results by communication channel
• Some of the takeaways from the different tests we ran
• Breakdown of more in-depth results for email & snippet communication channels

Channel-by-channel results

Testing

Due to the sample sizes and other constraints in different channels, the only ones in which we were able to conduct true A/B tests were the about:home snippet and the FF & You newsletter.

Snippet tests

The following snippets were tested against each other at one point or another:

Test 1

Snippet A: Watch <link>The Mozilla Story</link> to see how we’re shaping the Web and <link>how you can help!</link>

Snippet B: Watch <link>The Mozilla Story</link> and help us keep the Web a constantly evolving source for innovation.

Results: Snippet B had fewer clicks through to the video, but a statistically significantly greater number of donations.

Takeaways: Nothing too concrete here, except the wording of the second ask provides a bit more meat on what the user will be doing – helping us keep the web a constantly evolving source for innovation rather than just “how they can help” shape the web.

Test 2

Snippet B: Watch <link>The Mozilla Story</link> and help us keep the Web a constantly evolving source for innovation.

Snippet C: Help Mozilla keep the Web a place where anyone can dream, discover and create. <link>Make a donation by Dec. 31st.</link>

Snippet D: See how Mozilla is keeping the Web a force for good in the world — <link>and help us keep it up by making a year-end donation today!</link>

Results: We expected Snippets C & D to outperform B due the direct nature of the ask; the expected result would be fewer clicks on C & D, but more donations from them. That result held with C – it had ~1/4 the clicks of B, but twice the donations. However, D generated about the same number of clicks as C, but fewer donations than B.

Takeaways: Here, there are two factors that could lead C to outperform D – one is the specific date as the deadline, which makes it a bit more tangible, and the other is the “dream, discover and create” language, as compared to the “force for good in the world” wording. Helpfully, this matches precisely with where the Foundation is heading in the coming year.

Test 3

Snippet B: Watch <link>The Mozilla Story</link> and help us keep the Web a constantly evolving source for innovation.

Snippet F: Know the Mozilla story? How we’re a non-profit that puts you first? <link>Watch this quick video to learn more.</link>

Results: Snippet B significantly outperformed Snippet F on both clicks and donations.

Takeways: The difference was likely because there was a bit more substance to B, instead of just questions.

Test 4

Snippet C: Help Mozilla keep the Web a place where anyone can dream, discover and create. <link>Make a donation by Dec. 31st.</link>

Snippet E: Mozilla is a non-profit dedicated to keeping the Web awesome. <link>Help us make it happen. Donate today.</link>

Results: These snippets were roughly equal in their clicks generated, but C generated about 1.5X the number of donations as E.

Takeaways: Hard to draw any specific conclusions, other than the “dream, discover and create” language continuing to resonate.

Firefox email test

In this send, we were able to test three subject lines against each other. They were:

1. The force behind Firefox
2. Thank you for all you do
3. Help Mozilla protect the web

Results: “The force behind Firefox” vastly outperformed the other two (fewer unsubscribes, 50% more donations), and “Thank you for all you do” did slightly better than “Help Mozilla protect the web.”

Takeaways: For this audience, tying the ask back to their reference point – Firefox – was absolutely crucial.

Conclusions

It’s hard to draw too many conclusions from these tests, but the few that seem sound are:

• Providing a more tangible ask is better than trying to be mysterious
• If using a deadline, provide the specific date, even if it’s a common day
• The specific wording of the web as a place where people can “dream, discover and create” resonated more than the wording of the web as a “force for good in the world”
• With the Firefox audience, it’s important to tie the ask back to their reference point as much as possible

Fuller Results

Here’s a more in-depth breakdown of results from email and snippets, followed by a bit of summary of each one. A few metrics to define at the top:

• Clicks: Number of clicks on the main link
• Click %: Number of clicks / Number of recipients
• Response %: Number of donations / Number of recipients
• Unsubs: Number of recipients who unsubscribed in response to the email
• Donations / Unsubs: The ratio of donations to unsubs in response to an email. This can be a crucial monitoring metric to gauge relative success of an email. As a rule of thumb, a donations/unsubs rate of 1:2 for non-donors is good, and of 2:1 for donors is good.
• Conversion %: Clicks through to the page / number of donations

Firefox email

By far the most valuable channel for this campaign was the Firefox & You newsletter list. The EOY campaign & story video was promoted twice to this audience – in the December newsletter on 12/15, and in a standalone email from mark Surman on 12/28 (subject line tests) & 12/29 (main send).

Here are results from those sends:

The biggest takeaway for me from these results is that they were pretty great, especially for a non-donor/consumer-oriented list. They showed an appetite from this list to be told the story of what we at Mozilla are doing – and the story of how they’re doing something good just by using Firefox.

On the level of the most important metrics, the response rate and donation/unsubscribe ratio were both *very* good when compared with industry benchmarks to large lists of non-donors. I would have been very happy to see a response rate around 0.10% and a donation/unsub rate of 0.5. Instead, we saw a 0.15% response rate and a 0.8 donation/unsub rate!

The promotion in the December newsletter was less successful, as we’d expect when it’s put alongside a bunch of other content, with less space to tell a compelling story and make the case for giving – but it stands up fairly well to other results we’ve seen in that channel.

About:Home snippet

The homepage snippet was also tremendously important for the success of this campaign – including 100% snippet saturation in the final week of 2011.

Here are the results, split up by snippet and wave of rotation:

These were discussed a fair bit in the “testing” section above. A few things worth noting in addition:

• The low conversion rate is somewhat concerning, but it was much higher off of snippets with direct asks. This is in part a limitation of the medium – hard to tell a bit of story and make an ask in so little space — and partly a function of this being the first time a lot of folks were exposed to the idea of us as an organization that needs donor support.
• We certainly could have upped the total raised off of this channel by going with a “only direct ask” approach, but the strategy was also about long-term storytelling and cultivation, which was the reason for the large variety of approaches.
• Overall, the level of traffic that the snippet can drive is absolutely staggering. Working at Mozilla is awesome.

Join list emails

We sent four different emails to our own lists, with tailored content to folks who came in through SOPA (and actually only sent three to SOPA folks), and different ask amounts for donors and non-donors.

The first, on 12/8, had no direct asks – it discussed the story video along with some other things coming up (specifically the Ignite Project and the Learning, Freedom and the Web book.

The first direct fundraiser was on 12/21, with subsequent pushes on 12/26 (not to SOPA-only folks), and a final one on 12/31.

Here are the results:

We definitely saw the strongest results off of the first appeal, which isn’t too surprising. This audience had by far the best conversion rate of any major source of traffic, which I’d expect – every visitor who came through (except for the first email) did so from an explicit ask, made in long-form.

Overall, we definitely had the strongest “performance per impression” on this channel. That’s the main reason why it’s so important for us to continue building a strong list – it allows long-term narrative arc and a building story, rather than one-off touches.

Final Thoughts

Overall, we were thrilled with these results. In a single month, we raised more than we ever had before in a year. We shattered our goals for overall 2011 fundraising, and this is what did it.

Many thanks first, to everyone who donated to support our work! And tons of thanks to all the folks in User Engagement who helped promote this, and to the great people at Thought bubble, who produced the video.

Still reading? If you’ve any questions, thoughts, or concerns, please let me know in comments.

We brought her home yesterday, and she’s already pretty comfortable. Without further ado, here she is!

And check out that racing stripe!

We met her this evening and it went great, and we’re getting her for good on Saturday.

Yay!

But, the question remains: what’s her name? The rescue gave her “Fancy,” which neither of us are fans of.

Some potentials we’ve come up with are Sadie, Stella, & Mina — shooting for two syllables, ending in a vowel sound.

Any great ideas out there?

This fight is most definitely not over, but being put back on the shelf in an election year is a pretty darn good start.

So, congrats to everyone who worked tirelessly to make this happen, including tons of folks here at Mozilla and even more out there in the broader interwebz land.

Here’s the victory (for now) email we just sent out:

From: Me
Subject: You made it happen

Hi there,

Great news — this morning, Congressional leaders announced that votes on both the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act have been postponed!

Make no mistake — you made this happen.

This week, more than 13 million people spoke out against these disastrous pieces of legislation, and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it’s your protest and your action that made it happen.

To see some of the awesome numbers from Mozillians this week, check out this blog post, and you can see some internet-wide stats here.

There will be more that we need to do in the future on this — this fight is not over — but, for now: Thank You.

Ben

P.S. — We couldn’t do this without financial support from people like you. Can you chip in $5 or more so we’re prepared for whatever comes next?

–

Ben Simon
Join Mozilla Lead
Mozilla Foundation

2011 online donations to Mozilla: 9,643
2011 online revenue: $253,299
Current @Mozilla followers: 3,753
Current email subscribers: 207,477

This past week was a big one, filled both with SOPA news and increasing exposure for our Story video and end-of-year fundraising campaign.

On the SOPA front, we asked folks who’ve signed up to take part in the campaign who live in the US to call their representative in the US House — the judiciary committee was holding its markup hearings. Mozillians made thousands of calls — and a couple of hour ago we got word that the markup hearings were adjourned without a vote being taken on the full legislation!

While most of the amendment votes were definitely going against us, it’s clear that our side is getting the better of the arguments in committee, and more time until the final committee vote provides a great opportunity to help educate members of Congress on just what this legislation would do.

On the end-of-year fundraising front, this week’s biggest push came from inclusion in the Firefox & You newsletter, which has generated $3,635 so far, as well as continued exposure on the “about:home” snippet.

The biggest concern to me about the campaign so far is our conversion rates on the page (the number of people who donate as a percentage of the number of people who land on the donation page itself). Overall, the page conversion rate is ~0.11%, although the rates from “fuller” asks — those with a bit more context — are much higher than that, while conversion from the snippets is much lower.

We’re looking to do a bit of page testing as the month continues to try to see if we can boost it, and I’m also hopeful that increasingly direct asks that push to the page — becoming more and more about donations with less emphasis on the video — will also help.

In terms of what’s upcoming, these next two weeks will be nearly all fundraising — as SOPA & PIPA are now not moving until at least next month — with some emails to the Mozilla list along with a strong presence in Firefox promotional channels.

Here’s to a strong finish to 2011! And if you haven’t yet seen it, please check out the video that’s the centerpiece of our end-of-year campaign (and consider making a donation) at http://Mozilla.org/Story.

Working chronologically in reverse, what’s happening soonest is that the House Judiciary Committee — which has jurisdiction over the bill, and the greatest power to stop or change it — has scheduled the legislation for what’s called “markup” this Thursday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Markup provides the opportunity for legislators to make edits to the bill to make it less harmful to the internet we know and love, and to weaken support for it overall — after any edits are made, the committee will take a vote on whether or not to send it to the House floor.

While we expect it to pass, this is a big opportunity to alter its course — so we’ve asked those who’ve signed up to take part in the campaign to call their representatives and otherwise take part in the actions being promoted at AmericanCensorhip.org.

Additionally, last week Rep. Darrel Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden — two of our biggest allies on this — unveiled what they’re calling the “OPEN Act.” Today, Mozilla published a letter in support of the OPEN Act in some DC papers along with Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, AOL, Zynga, and Yahoo! — you can read the letter here.

Before these two developments, the last major push was that in the last week of November and early this month there was a lot of concern that the Senate would try to move the Protect IP Act for a vote before the end of the year. An outpouring of support from thousands of Mozillians and others from across the web (along with a protracted fight on the payroll tax extension and other items) helped ensure that didn’t happen. It could move again in January, though — PIPA is still very much alive.

For now, I’d encourage anyone who can — those who live in the US — to call their representative in the House about SOPA (you can use this easy tool), and for everyone, regardless of locale, to check out the censorship tool at http://AmericanCensorship.org/moz#censor and think about what you could censor to raise awareness about this.

And one awesome stat about this campaign so far? As of today, at least 181,200 individual Mozillians have completed an action against SOPA or PIPA on a Mozilla web site. Great stuff.

Here’s the letter that we published today on the OPEN Act:

First, here’s what last week’s actions generated (not just Mozilla):

–More than 1 million emails to Congress
–More than 80,000 calls to Congress
–A tremendous amount of media attention on opposition to this legislation

Additionally, there have been nearly 65,000 Mozillians who have signed up to participate in our efforts on this issue going forward. One particularly awesome representation of just how many folks are participating on our end can be seen by taking a look at this string of tweets: http://mzl.la/tmjCPL

So what has this all gotten us? Well, two things, at a minimum:

1) It’s changed the conversation in DC. Whereas before last week, SOPA’s proponents expected quick and easy passage through Congress, our combined actions last week have shown a lot of people in Congress that voting for this is not a slam dunk — there are real reasons to oppose it, and there will be a price to pay for supporting it.
2) It’s activated a large segment of people — both in the US and abroad — to speak up and to say they want to continue to do so. This will allow us all to continue applying pressure going forward (which we must do in order to make sure neither of these pieces of legislation pass as currently written).

And where do we go from here? Legislatively, there’s some talk that the Senate could try to move PIPA as early as next week, while it looks like the next movement on SOPA is a committee markup currently scheduled for mid-December.

We’re still figuring out exactly what form the next Mozilla action will take (please chime in in comments with ideas if you have em!), but we’ll definitely be asking for your help again soon.

Also, one question we’ve seen from a few places is what you can do if you aren’t a US voter/resident. By far the most important thing you can do is blog/tweet/etc. and get the word out about this — it would have consequences outside of the US, so anything you can do to help is important. Additionally, Avaaz has set up a global petition, which is a great way to add your name in a way that will get seen in the US.

For more information on SOPA/PIPA in entertaining video form, you can check this out, and, if you haven’t yet done so, please make sure you’re signed up to take part in Mozilla’s efforts going forward.