2011 was quite a wild ride with embarking on my new life as a California based Mozillian. This past September, I joined the User Engagement Team (Go Team Pony!) and my role is to help coordinate – and localize – our email marketing efforts.

The main newsletter I’m involved with is the monthly “Firefox & You” newsletter. (Check it out here: https://www.mozilla.org/newsletter/ ) Every month, we send out an email with updates, tips and tricks, and featured add-ons and personas for Firefox users to check out and make their Firefox experience more, well, awesomer.  (I’m working on an email archive, so you can check out past editions – stay tuned.)

As our subscriber – and user – base grows and expands globally, we have to start constructing our email newsletter for a global audience. Currently, we offer our newsletter into French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.

It is important to note that there is a big difference in “translating” and “localizing” content. For example, a cool add-on in the States, may not be relevant to our users in France. There may be a specific Firefox event happening in our Mozilla Hispano community that our Spanish-speaking subscribers would want to know about. Mozilla is a global organization, Firefox is a global product, and our users are living all around the world!

Luckily, Mozilla is a vibrant community-driven organization made of awesome people.

The first edition of our Spanish newsletter was launched in November. The most exciting thing about this newsletter is that it was community led! Major kudos to the Mozilla Hispano team for reaching out to us to launch this new locale!

Inspired by this community-led newsletter, we’re now looking to expand our localization efforts in our current – and future – newsletter locales. Just last month, I worked with a Firefox enthusiast from Austria who helped translate and guide the German version of the newsletter; some members from the French community helped proof the French December newsletter content; and members from the Comunidade Mozilla Brasil are on board to start localizing the Portuguese newsletter this month.

This was a great way to wrap up 2011, and get ready for 2012 with the lofty goal of – wait for it – 15 email newsletter locales by the end of the year!

2012 is going to be brilliant.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting involved with the email newsletter localization project, shoot me an email (jdavis [at] Mozilla [dot] com)– or leave a comment below :-D