Hey Molly, Thank you for your feedback, it is really appreciated. There are a fair few points you’ve raised so I will do my best cover them all. For some background, mobile fundraising is vitally important. Desktop page views have been in decline for the past 2-3 years from 4.36 billion (Oct 2016) to 3.64 billion (Oct 2018). Likewise, the relative effectiveness as of mobile as a fundraising platform has historically been substantially lower compared with desktop. So we’ve been working hard to ensure that as user behaviours shift we are well prepared and that the future of the movement is safeguarded.
We show two types of banner to users on both desktop and mobile. The first banner is larger and shown only once to user in their browser followed by a second banner that is show to the user typically up to a maximum of 9 times and is substantially smaller. Our mobile large banner changed last November from a splash style banner to the current text message style. Since then one of the things that has constantly surprised us, is that people seem to genuinely read the extra content. We’ve repeatedly tested over the past year removing content and every time, the shorter banners loose. Now this could just imply that it’s length that was producing move effective banners. So we decided to confirm if people were actually reading our banners. We tested two banners of similar length, one with our best copy and one where we replaced some of the lower paragraphs with copy had historically lost out in previous testing. Our best copy won and confirmed that people are actually invested in reading our banners. So the copy is long and we are continuing to try and shorten it but we genuinely believe its not just impactful of genuine value to our readers and donors. When we implemented this style of banner we made sure to add a toolbar to the top that enabled users to skip straight to the article. You mentioned on facebook that you didn’t notice that we will look to see if we can make the toolbar a little more visible to users. Regarding the bottom red banner, that is something that was retained from previous versions of this banner. We actually have just instrumented our banners so that we could track the effectiveness. We got data that this additional call to action was not performing as originally expected, most likely due to the format of the banner having changed since last year. We re-tested removing this and the effect was minimal and so we have removed this in our large banner on the first impression. We completely agree that it’s vitally important to ensure our readers who use assistive technologies are supported and we are going to look at how we can improve our banner content to ensure compatibility and provide a good experience including improving descriptions, providing better descriptions and maybe look at suppressing some content for screen readers to reduce some of the impact for them. I will copy this to your cross post on wiki too :) Thank you again for your feedback, it is genuinely appreciated and the fundraising team are actively acting on it. Regards Seddon On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 4:52 PM GorillaWarfare < gorillawarfarewikipe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey all, > > I feel a little bad raising this because I know there was some community > vetting of fundraising initiatives that I ignored, but please forgive me. I > brought this up in the Wikimedia Weekly Facebook group asking where best to > raise the issue, and it was suggested I post here. > > I was looking something up on my phone just now, apparently not logged in > to Wikipedia, and I discovered that mobile users in the US (and presumably > elsewhere) are being shown enormous ads. It took four full page scrolls for > me to reach the content of the article I was hoping to read. Even once I > made it past the ads at the top of the page, I was greeted with a pop-in > banner from the bottom of the page, as if I could possibly have not noticed > the four pages of text asking me to donate. (Screenshots attached). > > I understand that we need donations to keep the site running and all, but > this seems excessive. I particularly worry for people who use assistive > technology who are having to listen to or try to skip through four pages' > worth of text-to-speech before they can get to what they want to know. The > WMF needs donations, but I think we need to weigh the need for cash against > the goal of providing free and accessible information to our readers. A > couple of page scrolls might not seem like much, but I assume if they're > off-putting to me (a reader with good vision and generally high tolerance > for WMF money pleas) they'll be off-putting to others. > > So much of this text could be cut out. I work for a marketing/sales company > in a non-marketing role, and I've heard from colleagues that it's > frustrating when people writing copy like this hear from people who are not > educated about appealing to people, so I don't pretend to know better than > you at the WMF or your consultants about how to write good donation copy. > But to my (admittedly uneducated eye), copy like "It's a little awkward to > ask you, this Friday, as we're sure you are busy and we don't want to > interrupt you." and "We can't afford to feel embarrassed, asking you to > make a donation—just like you should never feel embarrassed when you have > to ask Wikipedia for information." seems like at best it's not adding > anything besides more words to have to scroll past, and at worst it's > pretty cringey to read. Are you really expecting people will read all four > pages? > > – Molly (GorillaWarfare) > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> -- Seddon *Community and Audience Engagement Associate* *Advancement (Fundraising), Wikimedia Foundation* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
