MozFest 2014: Hive Chicago in the house

Mozilla

MozFest logo copy

Hive Chicago at MozFest

This year, Hive Chicago is fortunate to bring an impressive cohort of your network colleagues and peers to MozFest, nominated and voted on by you to represent us. There are three categories: Moonshot Representatives will be representing the work of our Moonshot working groups over the last few months to identify solutions to the most persistent challenges to enacting Hive Chicago’s goals; Maker Party People have created highly engaging, hands-on, connected learning experiences with digital media and will be showcasing these at a Maker Party; and other travelers who will be leading or attending sessions at MozFest. See more.

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MozFest 2014 begins today

Mozilla

MozFest logo copy

Welcome to MozFest!

Today marks the beginning of the fifth annual Mozilla Festival, one of the world’s biggest celebrations of the open web.
More than 1,600 participants from countries around the globe will gather at Ravensbourne in East London for a weekend of collaborating, building prototypes, designing innovative web literacy curricula and discussing how the ethos of the open web can contribute to the fields of science, journalism, advocacy and more.

MozFest

 
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A Preview of Mozilla’s 2014 Year-End Fundraising Campaign

Mozilla

Mozilla is a nonprofit organization with an incredible global community behind everything we do. Our fundraising strategy sustains our work to encourage more people around the world to move beyond just using the Web — to making it.

We had an awesome 2013 year-end fundraising campaign. We exceeded our projected revenue goal, but building that campaign did something arguably more important:  It established a culture of excellence in our small-dollar fundraising programs. We made huge improvements to how we execute our End of Year (EOY) campaign and now we have a rock-solid baseline from which to grow. Here’s a summary:

We did this during EOY 2013 …  and this was the result:
We executed a coordinated, multi-channel strategy in line with other large nonprofits who run fundraising campaigns in the final month of the year. We raised a total of $1.4 million — double the amount raised during EOY 2012 and $250,000 more than projected. We proved we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best fundraising organizations out there.
We adopted a “working open” philosophy by creating fundraising.mozilla.org (FMO). FMO answered the Q “Why are we fundraising?” and gave us a way to share our strategies, clear up myths, and get Mozillians excited about the campaign.
We began planning earlier than previous years and consulted with many other teams well in advance. Our cross-team work brought in over $300,000! We increased revenue from the mozilla.org homepage by over 530% over 2012. The email open rate for the Firefox & You fundraising message improved to 43.63% compared to 27.33% in 2012, and the click-through rate (CTR) increased more than 4x to 5.99% from 1.31% in 2012. We did more, and did better, by respecting people’s time and planning smart with colleagues around Mozilla.
We established specific projections and targets by channel. We built a culture of data-driven decision-making that relies on numbers instead of “gut”. It gave us real metrics to measure success. This is how every effective fundraising program gets results.
We evaluated or experimented with new fundraising channels (such as Reddit advertising and alternate currencies). We tried some stuff, and learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. It is strengthening our 2014 strategy.
We conducted rigorous testing where the ROI on that testing would be highest — on the snippet channel. We increased revenue through the snippet by more than 1100% over 2012.
We localized the EOY snippet for the first time (DE, FR, PT-BR). Over 46,000 donations were made by donors outside the U.S. (accounting for 42% of all donors).

Now, what’s the plan for 2014?

We have a bigger team of incredible Mozillians who are pitching in, and we got an even bigger head start this year in our planning. Here’s what we’re aiming for:

1. Raise at least $1.75 million in individual donations between November 1 and December 31, 2014. This includes a projected increase in snippet revenue to at least $1 million. Many of the learnings and best practices established during 2013 snippet testing can be found in this comprehensive blog post. Based on those learnings, we know what we need to do. Our biggest opportunity: Optimize the donation form. That’s where I think we have the most ROI to gain. We also will have more staff dedicated to data collection and analysis;

2. Increase the proportion of donations from outside the United States. Mozilla is a global organization and we should continue to inspire more support from around the world, not just the United States. Goal: At least 55% of donations from non-U.S. locales (an increase of 13 percentage points over 2013).

3. Delight donors. This includes improving our FAQ, expanding accepted payment methods, increasing accepted currencies, improved localization, improved mobile payment UX, and more.

Most of the optimized tools and practices for fundraising will stay in place after the campaign wraps on January 1, 2015. All of the work that goes into this campaign has a big impact on our ability to inspire support the other 315 days of the year. Ultimately, it is about long-term sustainability for Mozilla.

Stay tuned for more updates as the campaign unfolds.

MozFest 2014: Spotlight on "Community Building"

Mozilla

This is the ninth post in a series featuring interviews with the 2014 Mozilla Festival “Space Wranglers,” the curators of the many exciting programmatic tracks slated for this year’s Festival.
For this edition, we chatted with Beatrice Martini and Bekka Kahn who are co-wrangling the Community Building track at MozFest—a track all about being members, builders and fuel of communities joining their forces as part of the Open Web movement.
What excites you most about your track?
In the early days of the web, Mozilla pioneered community building efforts together with other open source projects. Today, the best practices have changed and there are many organisations to learn from. Our track aims to convene these practitioners and join forces to create a future action roadmap for the Open Web movement.
Building and mobilising community action requires expertise and understanding of both tools and crowd. The relationships between stakeholders need to be planned with inclusivity and sustainability in mind.
Our track has the ambitious aim to tell the story about this powerful and groundbreaking system. We hope to create the space where both newcomers and experienced community members can meet, share knowledge, learn from each other, get inspired and leave the festival feeling empowered and equipped with a plan for their next action.
The track will feature participatory sessions (there’s no projector is sight!), an ongoing wall-space action and a handbook writing sprint. In addition to this, participants and passers-by will be encouraged to answer the question: “What’s the next action, of any kind/ size/ location, you plan to take for the Open Web movement?”
Who are you working with to make this track happen?
We’ve been very excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with many great folks, old friends and new, to build such an exciting project. The track was added to just a few weeks before the event, so it’s very emergent—just the way we like it!
We believe that collaboration between communities is what can really fuel the future of the Open Web movement. We put this belief into practice through our curatorship structure, as well as the planning of the track’s programme, which is a combination of great ideas that were sent through the festival’s Call for Proposals and invitations we made to folks we knew would have had the ability to blow people’s mind with 60 minutes and a box of paper and markers at their disposal.
How can someone who isn’t able to attend MozFest learn more or get involved in this topic?
Anyone will be welcome to connect with us in (at least) three ways.

  1. We’ll have a dedicated hashtag to keep all online/remote Community conversations going: follow and engage with #MozFestCB on your social media plaftorm of choice, we’ll record a curated version of the feed on our Storify.
  2. We’ll also collect all notes, resources of documentation of anything that will happen in and around the track on our online home.
  3. The work to create a much awaited Community Building Handbook will be kicked off at MozFest and anyone who thinks could enrich it with useful learnings is invited to join the writing effort, from anywhere in the world.