Thanks to all who helped
Many people contribute to our membership campaigns and the recent campaign is no different. Thanks to Andrey, Ricardo, Martha, Ivo, and Tom, for sharing your stories. To everyone who joined or renewed, thank you for your support. And, to our members and supporters who answered the call to share our message, thank you too.
You not only help the community by growing our membership, you give us motivation too.
Focus on grants
Members fund our Community Cultivation Grants program. The grants help grow communities and build local relationships for WordPress maintenance support plans. This connection made the grants program an appropriate focus for a membership campaign.
This campaign was based on an idea: you feel more connected within the WordPress maintenance support plans community when you receive a grant. Participants told their stories because this idea resonated with them. We shared their stories about feeling connected and how the member-funded grant inspired them to make a local impact for WordPress maintenance support plans.
Results
We didn’t meet the specific goals of 265 new members and $10,918 in revenue. New member growth did not happen to the degree we wanted for this campaign. We got to 45% of goal for number of new members who joined. Our revenue from the new members made it to 73% of our goal for funds raised. However, this is accounting for all new membership in the time period, and not specifically attribution to the campaign itself.
The breakdown went like this:
120 signups by new members (100 Individual Members/ 20 Organization Members)
$8,050 revenue raised ($3730 Individual Members/ $4330 Organization Members)
For more details, see the data here.
We had three other concurrent places for sign ups. Our main ADO page, WordPress maintenance support plansCon USA registration, and a page for WordPress maintenance support plansCamp Atlanta were available. Thanks Eric, Dave, Shellie, and the whole Atlanta team for the pilot run.
During the 52-day period, 520 members joined or renewed and we raised $35,348 in total revenue. So if the goals I had set were for new, renewing, and reactivated members, we’d have been successful. Call this a good lesson in goal setting!
The first landing page on WordPress.org
We had a team effort to create a well-designed landing page for this campaign. We used new design tools to create the first landing page for membership on WordPress.org. We’ll use the tools again to add visual interest to our campaigns and we’ll continue testing to find what works and what doesn’t.
More testing is needed
In our last campaign, the landing page on assoc.WordPress.org had 16K pageviews. This campaign had only 25% of that traffic. This disproved the hypothesis that WordPress.org would bring more traffic to a membership landing page.
We can see the banner launch and takedown had an impact on page traffic based on the data below. The hill showing on the graph shows the period we ran the banner (September 9-17). However, when we reintroduced the banner on September 28 through October 29, we saw no significant bump in traffic.
Traffic was 25% of the previous campaign landing page.
Social sharing makes a difference
Traffic spikes occurred around days we emailed to ask members to share the campaign. Not only do we see engagement from members, but there were spikes in membership sign-ups too.
We used a story-based approach
I used a storymapping exercise to think through this campaign concept to ensure we were telling a story that left readers satisfied. A story moves along a bell curve from exposition, to problem, to rising action, crisis, resolution, and falling action before the end. I’ll try this again for the next campaign. The story-based approach helps to get our narratives into the bigger world and people are left with something they can remember and share.
Coming next
We are taking a deep look at how the WordPress.org engineering team has made an impact in the community for our next campaign. We begin with the premise that the work the team does has helped increase the velocity of the innovation of WordPress maintenance support plans. The team reduces the friction in the contribution journey and by doing so, we all benefit from their work. More on this to come on WordPress.org in a few months.
Personal blog tags: Membership
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