A couple of highlights for for Affiliates users. We’ve added French (Hourra!) and Czech (Hurá!) locales and added new buttons for Firefox Aurora (all locales except for fy-NL) and Firefox Beta (EN-US only right now as button l10n is still in progress).

2012 is looking great for Firefox Affiliates. Contests and prizing are queued up, new features are in development and we’re very close to being able to add locales for Korean, Bosnian, Albanian, Turkish, Serbian, Slovak and Russian. Migration of buttons from SpreadThunderbird is in progress too. We’ve also gotten a ton of help from our l10n teams in Asia in finding the right fonts and layouts for  buttons in those regions. A huge thank you to those teams for all their help.

If you’d like to help out have a look at the wiki to see what’s coming up. If you’d like to make Affiliates available in your locale or region or if you are a web developer familiar with HTML, CSS, Python or Django and want to get involved, please contact us at affiliates@mozilla.org or come hang out in #affiliates on irc.

We’ll be adding BrowserID in our other affiliate locales in 2012. If you’d like to learn more about BrowserID and how it works, this post on the Hacks Blog is a good primer.

Kudos  and thanks to the Affiliates and BrowserID teams for getting this live. We’re pretty excited to have this up and running only a few months after launching the new Affiliates program.

Unlike traditional affiliate programs, Firefox Affiliates doesn’t dole out cash for clicks or downloads. Instead top affiliates will get prizes, praise and good vibes. Top affiliates will be featured on the leaderboards (which update daily, so easy on that refresh button) and qualify for all kinds of great Firefox prizes.

The first set of buttons available are Firefox for Desktop, Firefox for Mobile and Firefox Plugin checker. Thanks to our amazing l10n and creative teams, these buttons are available in all launch locales: EN-US, ES, PT-BR, DE, Zh-TW, NL, Fy-NL, PL and SL. More locales will be added in the coming weeks. If you’re interested in adding a locale, please contact Stas Malolepszy, Milos Dinic or me for details. Mozilla recruiting buttons are currently available in EN-US, but will expanded to more locales as the contributor on-boarding process is expanded.

While we’re very happy that Firefox Affiliates has launched, it doesn’t stop there. We will continue to add more buttons, locales and features to the program. To do that, we need your help. If you’re interested in becoming a part of the Firefox Affiliates team, contact us at affiliates@mozilla.org or come hang out with us in #affiliates in irc.

I’d like to personally thank the kick-ass Affiliates build and launch team for getting this project up and running: Chris More, Mike Kelly, Corey Shields, Stas Malolepszy, Milos Dinic, Fred Wenzel, Matthew Brandt, Stephen Donner, Rebecca Billings, Paul Booker, Yvan Boily, Jason Thomas, Tobias Markus, Dave Dash, Alex Mayes, Ty Flanagan, Matej Novak, Laura Forrest and our amazing localizers. ^5s to all.

PS. Please sign up to be a Firefox Affiliate today. Host a button on your blog or website and please, please tell your friends. Also, if you’d like to help spread the word about the program please feel free to tweet about it!

Sample Tweet:
Become a Firefox Affiliate and get everything you need to share Firefox with the world! http://mzl.la/fxaffiliates

To accommodate interested Mozillians all over the world, we’ll be holding two chat sessions in #affiliates.

The first will be next Tuesday, August 9 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time (2 p.m. GMT, 6 a.m. PT). Then we’ll do it all again next Wednesday, August 10 at 6 p.m. Eastern Time (11 p.m. GMT, 3 p.m. PT).

If you can’t make the chat sessions, please feel free to drop in your ideas at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Websites/Affiliates/Future_Goals or contact me directly.

Looking forward to chatting with you!

We started in 2010 by partnering with the Madagascar Fauna Group, whose mission was to protect lemur habitats by discouraging deforestation and encouraging education on the island nation of Madagascar. We chose this group because Firefox 3.6 was code named Namoroka for a park in the north of Madagascar. The Mozilla community came together and raised almost $12,000.

The next parks project was for Thunderbird 3.0, which had been codenamed Lanikai after one of the world’s most beautiful beaches in Hawaii. For this campaign we partnered with Kupu, a local not-for-profit that meshes conservation of engandered sea birds with providing educational and career opportunities for at-risk youth. Again, the Mozilla community came through, raising more than $7,000 to help them use digital tecnology to support their mission.

Our last parks campaign in 2011 was with World Wildlife Fund. Firefox 4 was code named Tumucumaque for the world’s largest rainforest park in the north of Brazil. The park is bigger than belgium and the biodiversity of its ecosystem is like nowhere else on earth. This campaign was focused on raising funds to help the WWF protect this park in Brazil, protecing speices like the Jaguar. The Mozilla community raised over $13,000. We really do rock.  In addition to the fundraising campaign, Mozilla Japan created the Virtual Park demo, demonstrating the how we all create a diverse digital ecosystem with cool jungle graphics.

In all the campaigns we were able to use our considerable reach to help different not-for-profits around the world. Donations came in primarily from the US and Canada (the campaigns weren’t localized sadly), but people all over the world contributed to help these causes.

We also got some amazing feedback from our users on the program. Many people contacted us to thank us for doing good, happy to see Mozilla getting involved in conservation efforts. Even a gradeschool teacher in the United States used our lemur campaign to teach her students about Madagasar and the animals that live there.

As the program has been closed for now, you can check out an archive of all the old campaign pages here. A huge thank you to everyone who participated and donated.

This situation left us without an affiliates program, without a centralized way for us to encourage visitors to our blogs and websites to download Firefox. With the help of our creative team, localizers and the super-helpful David Boswell, we found a way to host Firefox 4 buttons at http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/buttons/. Almost all of these have been updated to be Firefox buttons without the version number. There are still a bunch of localizations that haven’t been added yet, as we’ve decided to wait until we have a full program up an running again. To everyone who did a localization for the new buttons, thank you for waiting. They’ll be put to use very soon.

Without a full affiliates program, the emptiness is palpable. But it’s also an opportunity. The old affiliates program, while great, was built back in 2004 and the way we communicate and market online has changed in many ways since then. By starting anew we have a chance to take the best features of the old system and build new ones that will make being an affiliate even more fun and rewarding.

To get this process going, we’re hustling to build a skeleton version of this site and launch it in late July — something very basic that we can build something amazing on with your feedback and help. We’re just finishing the wireframing process and will be getting design and development underway very quickly. We’re doing this so quickly so that we have the most basic of systems to work with while we’re coming up great ideas for the future of affiliates.

This new affiliates program will have two key features when it launches. First we’ll be able update and refresh content regularly. This means shiny new buttons for you to share. Next, and most excitingly, we’re going to be localize the entire site. Not just localized buttons, the whole site. This will make it easier for more people in more locales to promote Firefox.

What I’m looking to your help with is what to plan for v2 of this new affiliates program. Since you are people who used the previous system, I have some questions for you:

• What were the features you loved and what were the features you always wanted to have?
• What kinds of campaigns did you enjoy or find effective?
•  Are there ways that we can add a game or challenge element to make participating in affiliates more fun?
• If we want to communicate new campaigns or affiliate opportunities to you, how would you prefer we get in touch? E-mail? Alerts within this affiliates system when you’ve logged in?
• Are there any tools, like an image generator or a build-your-own-button creator, that would make l10n and customization better?
• Do you have any thoughts on how we can encourage participation in the affiliates program in a Mozilla fashion (think open, participatory, community-driven)?

I’m hoping to have a couple of irc chats in the next month or two to talk about ideas for v2 of the new affiliates program so stay tuned for times, but please feel free to leave comments and ideas below or send me a note at chelsea [AT] mozilla.com.

One final note before you share your ideas with me: Stats from the old Spread Firefox program will not carry over to the new system. For a variety of reasons, moving that user data isn’t possible. I am, however, working on a thank-you to the superstars of the old system and I hope that you’ll help in creating the new one with me.

Conveniently, I am starting a new position at Mozilla Corporation on Monday as User Engagement Manager on the (wait for it) User Engagement team.

My e-mail address will be changing on Monday (I’ll update when I know what to) and I’ll be posting more on my new responsibilities as I get a handle on them.

Update: E-mail wise you can reach me a chelsea [at] mozilla [dot] com, cnovak [at] mozilla [dot] com and at the foundation alias for awhile to come.

As a charity, we accept money from individual donors all over the world. This means dealing with payment processors and credit card companies. At its most basic level it means doing in a way that works with those values above. More specifically, it means adhering to a payment standard called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI as it’s known to its friends). It’s full of regulations that make sure that user credit card/payment data is handled securely. For example, if an organization wants to store or transmit credit card data over an API, it has to be PCI compliant. Why would we want to do that? PCI compliance involves a significant investment of money and staff. One-click payment processing is a start. Our previous donation experience involved a multi-click Homerian journey through PayPal. Nothing close to what’s considered a good user experience. This is why a lot of orgs look to third-party payment processing providers.

Another tool we need for looking after our donors is a CRM. Donors need to be thanked, get tax receipts and make it possible for us to maintain a relationship with them. We’re looking to have hundreds of thousands supporters of Mozilla, adding more each year. CRM software makes it possible for us to manage those relationships in a secure way.

As a bit of background, we tried to implement an open-source CRM and payment processing system in 2010. We consulted with its authors, got help from peers that use it and despite our best efforts, it failed. Amplifying the fail factor, this also took a really long time and caused a huge amount of delay. It was very frustrating for everyone involved who was trying hard to make this system work. We needed it to work as we weren’t even doing what gets taught in Fundraising 101. So we threw that system away and started over.

This time we decided to start working with a service provider. While there are a lot of fundraising platforms out there, we have a pretty specific set of needs: PCI compliance, multi-lingual support for localization and a willingness to meet our significant legal, data, privacy and security requirements.

When you look at that list of requirements, the list of options gets pretty short and in fact brought us to one specific company; Blue State Digital. They’ve met our requirements and they’re experienced with dealing with values-driven orgs. We’ve been working with them since September and it’s been a big improvement for us. We started accepting donations via the BSD system on November 12 and the increase in our conversion rates has been notable. For example, comparing December 2009 and 2010 there’s a 312% increase in donations (full disclosure, BSD wasn’t the only variable, as we also had a fundraising campaign in market, so that helped too). Having a system where we can track donations in real time, steward donors and run reports is like living in a new world in terms of donor management and reporting for restricted donations.

It’s not all sunshine and puppies mind you. Localization is hard with this system, requiring a lot of manual work instead of the process we use for the rest of Mozilla. It’s frustrating for localizers in particular, but we are working on it and are hoping to add more locales to the system with a steady cadence. If you’re interested in the particulars of the challenges join our forum or check out the wiki page.

We are also looking for other front-end options for the future of the program as there are many more features we want to add, like a store. But any provider we’re looking for will have to meet the criteria set out above.

As always, we’re looking for ways to do this better. If you know of any storefront solutions that might meet our needs, drop me a line or leave a comment. If you find any bugs with our donation pages or have an idea of how we can make this better, you can file them under the product – websites, component – donate.mozilla.org.

For those who are interested I’ve included some up-and-coming items like Spanish and Portuguese versions of the Join Mozilla T-shirt (available really soon!) and the hangtag (or as I like to call it, thank you tag). We’ll soon be including this tag with the Join Mozilla T-shirt packs that are shipped out to supporters who add $25 on to their donation. Note: the pink lines mark where the card will be cut out and attached to the shirt like a clothing tag.

We created tags like these for the Open Web Fund dino shirts that we’ve been sending out for about a year now and they were well received.  

This time we thought it would be fun to add a Mad Lib-like option to the card to encourage creative sharing with friends and family.

The tags will be localized into DE, ES and PT and will ship out with Join Mozilla supporter packs early next month when we are out of beta. I’m going to see if there’s a way to send them out to our very wonderful early adopters as well, as their T-shirt packs are already on their way.

If you have an idea for fun ways we can thank Mozilla supporters or just want to lend a hand, please check out our our forum or leave a note below.

Here’s a slidecast of the talk that I gave. I planned to show this video before the talk began, but sadly technical issues on site prevented me from showing it with sound. So watch that first to get you in the mood.

Also, here’s the link to that PBS State of the Union broadcast using popcorn.js I referenced in the slidecast. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/sotu-video/

While we weren’t able to launch the program in time for CeBIT, I did get a chance to talk to some German users about Join Mozilla and the feedback, while small in scale, was positive. I started the conversation by talking about the fact that Mozilla is a non-profit organization and about the many great projects we develop and support outside of Firefox. There was a lot of good reaction to Drumbeat and the various Drumbeat projects in the works. A particular highlight was doing a quick demo of the Universal Subtitles tool for a deaf father and son who were visiting the booth. Seeing their reaction to how easy it was to use and the potential for what it could do was a highlight of the week.

Some people wanted to sign up for Join Mozilla on the spot. Especially after seeing what the t-shirts looked like. Overall it was encouraging to see that people understood what Join Mozilla was about and that they were excited about getting involved.