User Engagement/suggestions

Email engagement and local communities: localize the emails and adapt them for every region (users are different from country to country) - this requires a strong collaboration with local communities (lead monthly discussions, conduct regional studies/surveys on Fx/Tb penetration on regional markets as well as the understanding of Mozilla and its mission. Here we should work close with local communities. A more elaborated and "localized" (not only translated) emails could definitely help on engaging users from different regions.

• As an example is the Balkans regional community (a joint of local communities from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Slovenia).

One of our goals for 2010 is "Define what is unique to the Balkan region (ie. region-specific market research)". We are working together to identify specific things on our regions (what users like about Mozilla and its products, what they understand or not, how to help on growing the Fx marketshare in every country, spread the word about Mozilla Mission and engage users with Drumbeat).

Growing participation. Spreadfirefox and Spreadthunderbird are good places, but still not all people are using them (search for additional channels). Social networking - identify regional social networks (as Tuenti in Spain) and use Identi.ca too!!! .

• Participation doesn't mean only spreading the word, but also educate: lot of Mozillians are doing great presentations that can help people to learn about Firefox, Web, standards and inspire them to do their own presentations - make an official Mozilla channel on Slideshare.

• Bi-weekly engagement calls: the problem - many people can't participate because of the timezone. Encourage and support local communities to led their own regional calls. Use bi-weekly (or monthly) calls for major updates or for discussing projects.

• Community engagement is a first step to engage our users. If the community (core contributors, early contributors) don't understand and actively participate in the design and planning of campaigns/marketing projects then is less probable to grow the interest and participation of our community of users. Participation doesn't mean only help spreading the word and promote but also think/make/come with feedback and ideas.

Think at the community (users + contributors) as a concentric circle (in the middle being the core contributors, then early contributors, testers/tech. users, early adopter users). What unifies these circles is the motivation. Once that the core contributors are motivated to keep adding their value and time to make the project(s) successful, the same users are motivated to use Mozilla's products, to know more about Mozilla's mission and start participate to the movement. We can see the motivation as an axe which cross the concentric circles and the energy starting from the middle of the axe and spreading (with a lower intensity) toward the heads. What we have to do is to ensure that people participate in all levels in order to spread the energy further.

Mozilla - public benefit organization and Web as a cause.

• Mozilla has been always a public benefit organization for people deeply involved in the project. But (unfortunately) most of the users see Mozilla as the browser maker, a company and sometimes they identify Mozilla with the product they use (Firefox, Thunderbird or SeaMonkey).

• Indeed searching for a new ways to fund-raising is a challenge and the only possible and successful way is to promote Mozilla as public benefit organization with the Open Web as a cause.

• The challenge comes when different countries understands different the Open Web (how do we promote our cause in Africa? or in some countries from Asia?). How to make people from Romania believe in NGO's ;)? How do we engage more Open Internet/Free Software activists with Mozilla's Mission and grow our advocates/activists community? For some users the technological improvements are important, for other users the freedom is important and some users stick with a project because of it's social innovation program (e.g Drumbeat). Indeed the Open Web means different things for different users.

• As a suggestion: make an user segmentation map. Eventually, collaborate with local communities to have a background of different regions/cultures. Also, spreading the word about our cause different for different regions/countries may be a good thing. Work together with local communities to see which is the best way to spread the word about Mozilla's Mission, where is needed to speak and strength the Mozilla history, where we need to speak more about free software (open source) and the importance of open standard etc.

• Support local communities on organizing mixed events (including Drumbeat events) - this is the way we can introduce the Drumbeat movement to the world and recruit new projects.

• Donor snippets could be placed on key pages as: Mozilla's Mission, Get Involved, Projects and Movements. Also, find a way to link with the Firefox/Thunderbird download page since lot of people go there to download the products.

• To increase the donors numbers we should give to them the motivation. Why they should donate to this organization? Present very clearly which is the mission and the actions (eg. A community of hundreds is working everyday to ensure that you and the next generations will have the same open and accessible web. Underline who we are. Educate people to promote Mozilla as One Mozilla - A public benefit organization (and not a company, start-up or browser makers ;) ).

• Sometimes we need to speak a bit more about Free Software (or the difference we have been making in the Free Software movement - because is huge!).