Re: [Tails-project] Analysis of the donation campaign from l…

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: Public mailing list about the Tails project
Old-Topics: [Tails-project] Analysis of the donation campaign from last year
Subject: Re: [Tails-project] Analysis of the donation campaign from last year
Hi,

sajolida:
> It took me a while but here is a report on our first donation campaign
> that we did last year between October 13 and January 12.


Thanks a lot, this was a very interesting read.

> - The anonymized logs from our website that I had to process with
> custom code and commands. I faced several issues while processing
> these:


I'll skip that because:

[…]

> All these issues with logs and referrers, the manual work to
> manipulate them and the errors and missing information would be easy
> to solve with Piwik. Piwik would also make it possible to adjust
> these stats to visits instead of using hits as I'm doing here.


> […]


> - Put more energy into big donors.


> 61% of the money raised comes from big donors (>$99). How can we
> make them stay and attract others?


Yes. OTOH I find it amazing that the smaller donors manage to raise
39%, i.e. we can also rely on an excellent long tail :)

> - Increase the incentives to donate outside of campaigns.


> Dropping the banner, after people were really tired of seeing it in
> January 12, only reduced donations by half. Could we get closer to
> the average of January throughout the whole year by increasing the
> visibility of our donation link and explain better why need donations?


This seems like a very good question to me.

> - Do less posts and focus more on the benefits for the users.


> We did 5 blogs posts but the first one lead to more donation amount
> and count that the other 4 combined. The second most successful blog
> post and only exception to an otherwise constant decrease was the one
> giving hints on our plans for 2017. Donors seems to be reacting better
> to incentives about changes in the product and benefits to users than
> about our organization and accountability.


Very interesting!

> - Consider lowering the $250 and $500 buttons.


> More people used the "Other" button to specify more than $100 (4)
> than people who used $250 and $500 combined (3). In comparison, 33
> people used the $100 button. What about changing $250 and $500 to be
> $150 and $200? This is a very small data sample for sure...


Seems worth trying.

> Studying the amount of the Bitcoin donations might give us hints on
> what would be better numbers.


Yes.

> - Consider having a permanent section on /home about donating.


> The banner on /home was the most powerful incentive (21.8% of hits),
> could we make this work throughout the year with a single effort?


Same as "increasing the visibility of our donation link and explain
better why need donations", it seems to be a lead worth pursuing.

> Otherwise regarding referrers:


>   * I don't understand why the most popular referrer is
>     "https://tails.boum.org/". Any idea?
>   * The third more popular referrer is "-" which probably aggregates a
>     bunch of stuff but I can't really know what because of my bug c):


>     - People clicking on links in emails from help desk or to past
>       donors.
>     - Onion sites. Because there's otherwise no reference to any .onion.
>     - That still sounds a lot, no? Does Tor Browser do that by default
>       across domains? Any other idea?


Both seem worth researching as I assume Piwik won't magically make
sense of that data.

Cheers,
--
intrigeri