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A Look Back at Privacy Day 2015

This post is co-authored by Stacy Martin & Greg Jost

Privacy Day is always an amazing opportunity to showcase Mozilla’s deep privacy roots. Each year, we try to do something a little different and this year we went bigger and better. With extensive help from our engagement team, we unified Mozilla’s Privacy Day efforts around a new “get smart on privacy” campaign.

Campaign goals were to raise awareness about privacy as a key issue of online life; encourage users to form a point of view and take action; and underscore that privacy is an essential part of Mozilla’s mission.

Our campaign website highlighted four easy steps to get smart on privacy and our snippets drove traffic to the page:

step 1: Ask yourself about privacy
step 2: Learn about privacy and why it matters
step 3: Find out what you can do
step 4: Start a conversation and share what you have learned

Screen Shot 2015-03-12 at 10.16.14 PM

Traffic to the campaign website increased more than tenfold over last year’s campaign – a good sign that we’re reaching more people!

New this year was our Privacy Day Twitter Chat, with invited guests from CDT, DuckDuckGo, iKeepSafe, and Intel Security. With 3000+ posts, the response was really incredible and the event was fast paced and fun. Participants submitted thoughtful questions, engaging in a real conversation with privacy leaders who shared tangible tips/steps for better privacy.

#PrivacyChat

#PrivacyChat

During the hour long chat, our hashtag, #PrivacyChat, became a trending topic on Twitter in the United States. Pretty exciting! Localization in Spanish was provided by our Mozilla Hispano community, expanding our reach and engagement much further. We enjoyed #PrivacyChat so much that we’d like to do more of them throughout the year across a range of policy topics.

One interesting highlight, the click thru on our Privacy Day tile was more than three times the average and a tenfold increase over our previous privacy tile – another great sign that we’re reaching more people!  Tiles (presented to new users of Firefox Desktop) are localized in 20+ countries and 6+ languages around the world.  We’re pretty excited about the opportunity for users to connect to Mozilla initiatives through tiles.

Privacy Day Tile

Privacy Day Tile

We also had two live events, both in San Francisco – Privacy Lab and “Escape the Internet”.

Privacy Lab on January 28th was our first meetup for privacy minded professionals. The goal of Privacy Lab is to incubate an ongoing series of meetups to bring people together around privacy, to share what they are working on and talk about how to collaborate. Our first event sold out (ok, the tickets were free, but it was still exciting!).  We received some really good feedback and are committed to keeping the momentum going. In February we hosted our second Privacy Lab and are currently planning March and April events. To learn more, click here.  We’d love to have you join us!

The following day, the dynamic and mysterious Nico Sell spoke to our employees and volunteers, as the first in our new “Life in the Offices” series.  Nico is the founder and CEO of Wickr, a private messaging app. Her engaging presentation, titled “Escape the Internet” expressed her passion for keeping private communications off the Internet.  If you missed it, her presentation is recorded here.

A big win for us internally was strong collaboration early and often across Mozilla, including marketing, PR, product, policy, legal, foundation, workplace resources, community and more. We learned a great deal about how to work together to create more impact as a cross-functional team, and we’re eager to apply what we’ve learned to Privacy Day 2016.