As Online Fundraising (@spatton and @schoenbaechler) discussed with @Charlotte and @JMinor on September 6, we’re taking the app fundraising conversation to Phabricator. Josh and Charlotte asked us to prioritize things we’d like to try out in this year’s English campaign. We’d like to focus on the following areas to improve app fundraising in 2018, sorted by priority:
- App article fundraising: We think app fundraising has the most potential in this year’s campaign. Check out the Fundraising in the iOS / Android document to read why. Charlotte and Josh mentioned that there’s a chance that we might be able to have it ready for December. They have to speak to the lead engineers first. We think that app article banners could use similar copy and styles as used in app feed banners. Here’s a reference link to our current best Mobile article banner (Mobile Small).
- Weekday variable: Using copy that includes weekday has proven to be very effective. This would require a simple variable (%weekday%) that outputs the current day of the week. We’re using it throughout our banner web portfolio, here’s an example from our Desktop small banner
- Visible payment methods: An element that works well on the web is displaying payment methods that are accepted in the corresponding country. Accepted Credit Card providers slightly vary per country (see list below) and should ideally only be displayed when they’re available:
- US: Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, Amazon
- CA (Canada, not California 🙃), NZ: Visa, Mastercard, Amex
- GB, IE, AU: Visa, Mastercard, Amex, JCB
- Device variable: In the Mobile Small banner, we’re using the following copy: „It's easy on your phone and only takes a minute.” We know that tailoring the fundraising message to corresponding reader works (weekday, country). Replacing the *phone* part with the reader’s device name (Galaxy S9, Galaxy Note, iPhone, iPad, etc.) will almost certainly be effective.
- Visual helpers: Our experience tells us, that adding a red border, „information“ iconography, highlighting key copy lines (e.g. a red underline) or adding text hierarchy (e.g. bold title) to the banner helps in raising attention and conversion.
- A/B testing: As WMF’s A/B testing ambassadors, we’d love to look at some p-values in this year’s campaign. This sounds nerdy and we’re aware, but it’ll give us helpful data that can be compared with Mobile web. In short: The app is an exciting environment to learn from. This could be as simple as A/B testing the 2016 app feed banner with the one from 2017 and/or the 2017 with the overhauled 2018 variant.
Let’s discuss!
