Why? Simple: You don’t send an email to get people to open it. You send an email to get people to take an action (or, at least, you should!). And the fact is, worrying about open rate too much is not just misguided — it can also be counterproductive.

Here’s a great case in point from recent experience

A couple of weeks ago, for our penultimate appeal as part of our anniversary dinosaur campaign, we did subject line tests on our email.

Splitting our audience of recent donors (past 12 months) into three random test groups, we tested the following subject lines to 5,343 people each:

1) Victory Lap
2) Last chance to get your dino
3) Celebrating with all of you

Here were the open rates for each segment:

1) 49.1%
2) 40.9%
3) 45.7%

But, click rates were:

1) 3.5%
2) 3.8%
3) 3.1%

And here’s the number of donations from each segment — the action we really care about:

1) 43
2) 66
3) 53

So not only did the one doing much worse on opens win in donations, subject three, which was worse than subject one on both opens and clicks outperformed one on the metric that mattered.

It is worth flagging that the win on donations didn’t quite reach the 90% confidence level I’d like, but the broader point certainly still stands.

I got a few requests for the deck, so here it is!

A few notes:

— This was put together by Matt Compton and me back in 2011 for NOI Bootcamp. I did some updating, but he also deserves some blame. That’s also the reason for the NOI theme on the deck itself. [Edit: bunches of it came from a previously developed training by Colin Holtz. Apologies for the omission!]

— Some of the stats may no longer be correct (eg: avg. reader spends 2-7 seconds on an email), but I don’t think anything in there is so out of date as to substantively matter for these purposes.

— I’ve done my best at Mozilla to practice what I preach, but there are certainly times when you can’t follow every rule. Happy to hear any feedback.

There’s obviously a lot more to cover than just what’s here, but hopefully this is helpful to someone!

As compared to last year’s campaign, we did better this year in every way, and finished the year very well: We went from $435,791.56 total raised online in 2011, of which $205,748.20 came after November 28th (when this year’s campaign began), to $751,018.91 raised online in 2012, of which $356,242.69 came after November 28th.

Like last year, this success only came because we were able to get a solid ask in front of audiences who’d be interested in what we had to say. And, again, we saw that the venues which allow the most storytelling and explanation — the emails I sent to our list, and, most importantly, the standalone email to the Firefox & You Newsletter list — were the most lucrative channels, and best ways to fundraise.

Here’s a channel-by-channel breakdown, with the actual numbers in a table below:

Across the board, the numbers were better. What was different?

In some ways, it was just a numbers game: we were able to reach more people directly. For instance, the Mozilla.org list has increased dramatically — we were at ~232,000 subscribers on January 1st, 2012, and closed this year around 580,000, and had a year more in which to tell our story and engage people. Additionally, the Firefox & You list has grown quite a bit.

Further helping matters, the average gift also went up, since the main thrust of this year’s campaign was T-shirts, which require a minimum donation of $30. The graph below shows both donations (blue) & average gift (red), in 2011 vs. 2012.

So where does all this leave us? I’m very happy with this campaign. It was the first time we’ve really successfully fundraised from our email list — $93,000 from 5 emails is pretty awesome, considering where we’ve so recently been, and we continued earlier successes in other channels, most notably the FF & You list and the about:home snippet.

However, there is certainly plenty of room for growth. We’ve consistently done best leading with the “Get a Firefox T-Shirt” ask, but there’s only so many times we can return to that well, and straightforward pitches around Webmaker and other initiatives have not done nearly as well.

Additionally, we continue to have fairly low conversion rates, despite efforts at page testing & optimization, which I think is mostly to do with us still needing to do more in the grand scheme of things to turn Mozilla into an organization where people expect to land on a donation page — and then want to give.

But, lots to smile about with this, and lots more to do! Thanks again to everyone who helped pull this off, and, of course, to anyone reading this who gave.

We’ve raised well over $140,000 directly over our emails in that period, with more to come in 2012 as our End-of-Year campaign finishes.

And email was a key driver of excitement and growth around the Summer Code Party and the 2011 & 2012 Mozilla Festivals, as well as in our efforts against SOPA & PIPA earlier this year.

However, I think we (I) have fallen down in a couple of key areas:

–Long-term storytelling: I think there hasn’t been a great long-run narrative; I’m not sure that if you signed up for our list in, say, June of this year, you’d really have a great sense of what we’re doing. You’d know a lot about webmaker — from Summer Code Party, MozFest, etc. — but there’s an irregularity to what we’ve been sending that I think has not done a good job of keeping up a steady drumbeat/sense of a movement.

–Trying to apply an advocacy organization model to list growth and engagement: My background has been in working with groups — from Oxfam & NARAL to Obama for America — where taking a pretty classic approach to list growth (eg, petitions and sign-on letters that capitalize on specific moments and move directly into fundraising) has been the right approach.

So I want to change the focus a bit, and concentrate on more frequent, quality content that tells the story of what we’re doing. I’m envisioning roughly weekly, fairly short emails about a single thing within the broad Mozilla/Webmaker/Labs framework that provides a way for people to engage with what we’re doing. This will be in addition to semi-frequent fundraising appeals, of course, but should hopefully give people a much better sense of why they should care, and why a donation to support this work is important.

In contrast to a regular, monthly newsletter (something which has also been proposed internally) this will allow us to keep up a steadier pace and really only send something when we think there’s truly stellar content that warrants it. Regular newsletters run the risk of getting bogged down by the format and by the felt need to shoehorn content in.
Some examples of what these shorter sends could be:

–A description of a really cool event someone put on, that makes putting on an event sound cool and fun to others
–a couple of new projects get added to Webmaker
–The Webmaker gallery launches
–Valentine’s Day Lovebomb
–Something changes about Collusion
–Firefox OS takes a noteworthy leap
–Something else Product-Y that we can offer a bit of promo to
–Awesome standalone graphics (like the Mozilla in 2012 graphic that we sent this week)
–A community input pitch at a key moment
–Etc.

I’m excited to see how it does! I’ll also hold a control group out of this increased volume for a couple of months, to make sure it’s actually helping.

So, as long as you don’t wind up in the control group, look forward to hearing a bit more from us if you’re on our list next year.

And if you aren’t yet, please sign up! Just go to Mozilla.org and enter your address in the email signup box.

Pulkit Sethi, that winner, is from Washington, DC. He’s a software developer and Summer Code Party participant, who first heard about the Mozilla Festival a few months ago.

In his own words:

I am super physced to be selected to go to Mozilla Festival this year. I think what Mozilla Foundation is trying to do through this event is amazing. Bringing together people from various different domains to collaborate and share their thoughts and ideas on how to educate and empower people…amazing.

Personally for me, what I am looking forward to at the festival is collaborating with others on how to spread digital literacy. When I first started using technology, dial up internet was just coming out and people were still trying to figure out how to collaborate and build the web. But now the ability to learn, collaborate, and share is easier than ever before. I think it’s important to get the next generation involved, and show them how easy it can be to not just be consumers of content, but now become the producers.

I am also really looking forward to collaborating on the intersection of journalism and technology, and getting my hands dirty with a few of the design challenges. Living in DC, I’m inundated with political news and talk all day long. I’m excited to see what ideas and tools we can create to make the processing and understanding of that information easier.

See you in London!

Pretty awesome, huh? And here are a few stats on how the contest is going overall. In short: very well.

Total unique entrants: 14,388
Total entrants via donation: 2,781
Total amount raised: $38,432

And don’t forget: there’s still time to enter for you chance to join Pulkit — and hundreds of other Mozillians — if you haven’t yet!

And if you know you want to come but just haven’t registered yet, get thee to the registration page before tickets run out!

P.S. — Apologies to folks who don’t live in France, Germany, the UK, Mexico, Canada (excluding Quebec), or the US. Legal restrictions on doing contests like this are very onerous, and even being able to do it in these six countries took quite a bit of legwork. Many of the countries where we have the biggest communities simply do not allow chance-based contests like this, others allow them only if they’re based solely in that country, and others simply have rules and regulations that were too much to overcome. We’re hopeful that if we do it again in the future we’ll be able to grow the list of eligible countries.

If you happen to be on the mailing lists for any of the US election campaigns this might seem familiar to you: we’re making it possible for anyone* to donate for a chance to win a trip to the Mozilla Festival in London from November 9-11. It’s also possible to enter without donating.

This is exciting to me for a couple of reasons:

• I think it will be successful.
• It can help shine a light on some of the awesome stuff that happens at #MozFest every year.
• It’s the first non-evergreen campaign we’re running that’s localized. We have versions in French, Spanish, and German, with participation legal for those in US, UK, Canada (excluding Quebec), Mexico, Germany, and France.

Now, with all that said, a request for you, dear reader(s?): Can you help kick the can tires on our pages before we go wide?

Sample links for each of the four pages are here (with links to the signup pages in the text):

English: https://donate.mozilla.org/MozFest-Contest-Snip

French: https://donate.mozilla.org/MozFest-Contest-FR-Snip

Spanish: https://donate.mozilla.org/MozFest-Contest-ES-Snip

German: https://donate.mozilla.org/MozFest-Contest-DE-Snip

And the QA bug where you could enter anything you see is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790979

A note of caution: These pages are currently live, though this blog will be the first time the links are anywhere in the wild other than bugzilla. So if you make a donation, it will charge you, and if you sign up, it will enter you.

With all that said, thanks in advance for any help or thoughts! If you don’t want to enter something you see, please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me directly.

*As mentioned in the bullet list, it’s not actually a fully global campaign at this point — the rules & regs around things like this were too much to make that possible. To enter, you must be 21 or older and live in the US, UK, Canada (excluding Quebec), Mexico, France, or Germany.

This summer, Mozilla asked you to join in a unique global experiment: what if we invited people around the world to make and learn something amazing with the web?

The result was the world’s first-ever “Summer Code Party.” For the past 8 weeks, people have been getting together in big and small groups for some summer learning and fun. Trying out new Webmaker projects to unleash their digital creativity, gain new skills, and planting seeds for a more web literate world.

Thanks to you, the experiment has already been a huge success. Since the party kicked off on June 23, you have successfully run…

• more than 600 Summer Code Party events with
• 4,250 participants spread across
• 77 different countries!

And the party keeps on rolling. As we head into the party’s final month, there are events planned for Berlin, Cairo, India, the Netherlands, Colorado and Sioux City — to name just a few. Many of you will be hosting special “theme parties” around everything from sports to superheroes to “Call Me Maybe” remixes.

And it’s all gearing up for a global grand finale on September 22 and 23.

What are we making at #MozParty?

Some of our favorites from the past month:

• ParticleQuest. The winning hack at the CERN Summer Student Webfest remixed Mozilla’s BrowserQuest to give it a physics theme.
• Popcorning Barcelona. Explore a neighborhood on the outskirts of Barcelona with this Popcorn experiment from desdelamina.net.
• Hacking Little Brother. Cory Doctorow says he’s “proud and excited beyond words” to see youth using Popcorn to remix his novel, Little Brother.
• Robot-building. Youth at the “Future Library” in Veria, Greece used Thimble to create their own “How Tos” for building robots. (Check out Chloe’s post for more.)

• Thimble Composting. A great Thimble project from a group in Hawaii to create a ‘how to’ for composting — showing how easy it is to make your own pages with Thimble.
• Memes galore. The “Make your own meme” project continues to be one of the most popular — and a great way to get your first taste of HTML. Check out these examples.
• Lots more on Tumblr. Get a fuller taste of MozParty Makes on Tumblr. And check our new favorite MozParty photos.
• Got recent favorites of your own? Please share them with us here.

Gearing up for the grand finale: September 22 & 23

The Summer Code Party will wrap up with a grand finale the weekend of September 22 and 23. Let’s show the world what we made and learned together this summer, get together for demos and show and tells, and discuss what happens next.

Events are in the works at Mozilla spaces and partner venues in London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco — plus of course whatever you would like to add to the mix!

Get involved:

• Find an event near you. Search here or see all the upcoming events here.
• Start your own event. Start an event today, or as part of the big Sep 22 and 23 wrap-up. It can be big or small — our handy event kits make it easy.
• Check out the Sep 22 / 23 planning wiki. (Draft only — changing daily.) This wiki is where we’re fleshing out a) what’s happening and b) how to get involved.
  
• Share what you made at MozParty. Did you make, see or learn something amazing? Please submit it here so we can share with others.
• Get in touch. Join one of our weekly Webmaker community calls, newsgroup, or lots of other ways to get involved listed here.

Check out this ABC News video on a Summer Code Party event in New York

Reposted from an Open Matt post that was having some issues. This post written by @OpenMatt.
 

We led off, two weeks ago, with a monthly donation appeal focused on the core Webmaker program and the need for consistent support. Last week, we switched the focus to more about who some of the new webmakers are that this program is enabling, highlighted by this awesome “Meet the Webmakers” video:

Unfortunately, neither of those did particularly well. I wanted to try a different, more political tack, which is why I care about what we’re doing. In particular, I wanted to explicitly lay out the long-term, world altering vision behind the webmaker initiative, that goes beyond the present tense of enabling people to make awesome stuff on the Web (which is, on its own, awesome).

I’m pleased to be able to say that it does seem to be working better than the first two appeals we tried. It’s not going crazy gangbusters — we still have had more success asking people to donate $30 for a t-shirt — but it does seem to be resonating.

Here’s the appeal. Would love to hear what you think!

From: Me
Subject: The world I want to live in

Hi there,

I care about the Mozilla Webmaker program (I mean, I’d better, right?). But not for the reason you might think.

Yes, I want people to make awesome stuff and express themselves on the Web using our projects and resources. But here’s why I really care about it:

Because I want to live in a world where a proposal that could destroy the Web like SOPA or PIPA or ACTA would simply get laughed out of the room, no matter how powerful its proponents.

Right now, whether we’re talking about Washington or Brussels; Moscow, Ottawa or New Delhi, governments and leaders hold in their hands the power to let the Web flourish or to destroy it — and often they simply don’t understand what they’re dealing with.

But if, together, we can create a world where everyone grows up not just using the Web, but actively making it their own and learning how it works? That’s the world I want to live in.

It won’t be easy, and it cannot happen overnight. That’s why I’m asking you to help make it a reality, by chipping in $5 or more right now.

How do we do it? By building a movement of educators and contributors, kids and parents, learners and community leaders all working together to open the Web up for any and all to come together and make their mark. And by doing it together with the individuals, nonprofits, companies and governments who share our vision.

We’ve got an early set of resources — projects, tools and events — at Webmaker.org, but it’s just the beginning. Thousands of budding webmakers across the world have already gotten their first taste through the Summer Code Party.

But where we’re talking in the hundreds and thousands now, we need to be talking in the hundreds of thousands in a few years’ time. And we’ll only get there if you’re with us, from the start.

So what do you say? Can you make a donation of $5 or more, to help create a better world for us all?

https://donate.mozilla.org/Better-World

Thank you,

Ben

P.S. — This is a long-term project, but threats to the Web won’t stop in the meantime. That’s why we’ve helped found the Internet Defense League, it’s why we’re a founding signer of the Declaration of Internet Freedom, and it’s why we’re going to play a role in important policy fights as they come. But we also need to be playing the long game, and we need your support if we’re going to be successful. Please chip in today:

https://donate.mozilla.org/Better-World

–

Ben Simon
Sr. Manager of Organizing
Mozilla Foundation

Marking the launch of the Internet Defense League, (and not coincidentally going up the night of the Dark Knight Rises premiere), the Cat Signal is meant as a symbolic way to bring together folks from across the internet to defend the open Web and push to make it better.

Launched from the roof of our San Francisco office, we heard remarks from Mozilla’s Mark Surman & Mitchell Baker, from rabble-rouser and activist Eliabeth Stark, and from Craig Newmark.

It was a seriously awesome event — if you haven’t already signed up as a member of the league, do so now! And if you want to create your own IDL member page, we created a great project in Thimble to get you started.

A couple more pictures from last night: