Hello, Guess what? We make mistakes. We’re human! This year we at Mozilla set out to take on more new initiatives, reach for deeper impact, and go bigger than ever before. A lot of it went well – but we've also had our fair share of fails, goofs, oopsies, and dadgummits in 2023. And so we thought, why not share with our supporters about times where we tried things that didn't work out, or that went differently than expected, or where we simply screwed up? We thought you might appreciate transparency and honesty about our work, even when it's not all sunshine and roses. And yes, at the end of this email, we're going to ask if you can add a donation to Mozilla's end of year fundraising drive – while we won't promise perfection, we will promise transparency. So, here’s a highlight of our lowlights and what we learned in 2023: Mistake #1: Facebook Ads and Privacy Don't Mix | | | We wanted to get more people to sign one of our petitions as part of a campaign to get TikTok to be more transparent about how it shares user data. Our marketing team decided to try their hand at running ads on Facebook to reach people who might not be in the Mozilla universe yet. |
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What went wrong: Mozilla's commitment to user privacy is incompatible with the data sacrifices required by Meta. Turns out, if you don’t use Meta’s privacy-intrusive conversion pixel on your website – and you also refuse to give Meta any of your data – there's little chance of driving actions with their advertising. Lesson learned: It is impossible to build a movement to hold tech companies accountable while relying on the tools they want you to use. We'll stick to places that better represent our values – because that's also where we'll find people who are most committed to our movement. Mistake #2: Storms Bring Us Together, But Make Your Backup Plans | | | Mozilla Festival – better known as MozFest – is our global gathering of artists, activists, researchers, policymakers, and technologists. This year's MozFest event in Nairobi, Kenya focused on issues around a healthy internet and trustworthy AI in Eastern and Southern Africa. |
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What went wrong: MozFest got hammered by some truly terrible weather – a hail storm so bad and so loud it shut down a featured panel conversation; winds too high to walk between buildings; and a tent even blew over! People gathered together out of necessity and shared their own awful weather stories. The next day, the sunlight revealed a group of people who had literally weathered the storm together and built stronger bonds because of it. Lesson learned: Sometimes the worst storms bring us closer together. But also, always have backup plans for how to hold your event. Mistake #3: Worldwide Media Attention Affects Our Website | | | When we published our *Privacy Not Included Cars & Privacy buyer’s guide in September, we knew it would cause a stir. But we didn't dream of the global news coverage we actually got: Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Washington Post, El Pais, The Guardian, Times of India, Wired, and even Fox News – all in one day. (In retrospect, cars wanting to know about your sex life and genetic information was a huge story.) |
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What went wrong: The part of our website with the buyer's guide completely crashed. Like, BOOM, down it went, thanks to an unexpected overwhelming amount of news coverage and traffic. There are some technical reasons why it went down, but the short version is we hadn't retooled that part of the website to be more efficient when a lot of people wanted to look at products. Lesson learned: We simply weren’t prepared for the response we got, but it wasn't a simple fix either. We're now focusing on bigger, structural optimizations in our website to make sure nothing like that happens again. As annoying as it was when so many people wanted to learn more about cars and privacy, having too much interest in our work is also a good problem to have. We're Building a Movement to Reclaim the Internet The good news is that we try to learn from all our mistakes, adjust our plans, and move forward on a better path. We get to fail and learn from mistakes because of the support of supporters like you. Being able to fail and learn as opposed to fail and quit is what makes Mozilla so strong. Your donation is the key to that. (Of course, we also have a lot of wins this year – you'll hear more about them soon.) And with that, I will end with one final ask for you. Will you donate $25 to Mozilla and help build our movement to reclaim the internet? Donate to Mozilla → I hope that you have time here at the end of 2023 to reflect back on some of your biggest and best mistakes of the year. And then take a moment to reflect on what you learned, how you grew, and how you are stronger now thanks to those mistakes. Be kind to yourself when you make a mistake – it often holds the answer to a question you might never have known you had. Thank you for laughing, learning, and sometimes failing along with us in 2023 – and for all you do for the internet. Ashley Boyd
Senior Vice President, Global Advocacy
Mozilla |
