We recently encouraged people to volunteer at Mozilla as part of the 15th anniversary promotions and this drove a big jump in activity with a spike of over 1,700 people expressing interest in getting involved on one day.
Our mission really resonates and it is clear there is a connection between us talking about being a participatory community and people wanting to participate.
After the spike in activity leveled off, I was looking at the stats at arewegrowingyet.com and noticed some interesting things. One was that the mix of functional areas people were interested in changed.
Coding had been the most popular area of interest before the promotions, but interest in our education initiatives jumped to become the most popular. Interest in coding increased too, but by a smaller percent.
We had also recently started localizing the Get Involved page and this was clear in the stats too. There were jumps in activity across all locales (the chart for the Spanish version of the page is below).
I find it really encouraging that there is so much interest in getting involved across all of the things we do—including establish opportunities and new ones—and from all around the world. Exciting times 🙂
davidwboswell 
At least the German Get Involved mails about education mostly aren’t what you expect: I guess 2/3 of them are from people who want to be educated in general (“medicine”, “real estate”, “foreign countries”, “erotic”). If you also think of people which want the latest news from Mozilla as interested in something different (they get a mail how to sign up for the newsletter), then likely only 1/6 of the education mails are on topic. All other areas of interest have much higher rates on this.
Archaeopteryx, thanks for sharing your experience with the German contribution inquiries. That’s inline with what I’ve seen in other areas.
I think there’s a rule of thirds here — around 1/3 of inquiries are from promising candidiates, 1/3 may be qualified but there’s not enough information and 1/3 won’t be relevant (support questions, off-topics inquiries, etc).
It was also interesting to see how the range of inquiries changed during the 15 years promotions. I got the sense that the ratio of not-relevant inquiries went up when the page was being promoted.
I think that make sense — without promotions the page is normally being found by people who seek out that information. With the promotions it got in front of people who didn’t necessarily want to contribute, but filled out the form anyway. For instance, I saw a number of ‘Congratulations on your anniversary’ inquiries.