Thanks for starting that thread
In our French-speaking community we are lucky to have a strong involvement of our core Mozilla community around Nightly. This does of course help a lot converting users!
I think the message that resonates best with people outside of our community is that by using Nightly, thanks to the telemetry and their crash reports, they can be involved in Mozilla and help us build a better Firefox without any involvement apart from using it. A lot of people would like to get involved in Mozilla in some way but can’t find the time to actually get involved, therefore explaining them that just by the use of Firefox Nightly with telemetry on, they help Mozilla is a message very well received.
If you want to convince power users more interested in features than helping Mozilla, the key features that seem to resonnate seem to be:
- Containers: being able to use several twitter/gmail/facebook instances in the same window is a great feature
- Improved performances in general that make us generally comparable with Chrome, this is a good argument for people that switched to Chrome because of performances but actually would prefer to use Firefox if it were fast enough
- Being able to see the work on Quantum/Photon landing in real time, this is something that works best with people that follow Firefox development
In terms of community activities and word of mouth, our Twitter accounts localize all the relevant news from the @FirefoxNightly account so as that they reach a French-speaking audience. We wrote blog articles about Nightly and we also talk about Nightly in the events we participate in.
It’s worth noting that all of our community communication is targetting power users that are not mozillians. For example we had several workshops and presentations at open source events which are not Mozilla related (Ubuntu Party in Paris, Journées du Logicel Lybre in Lyon, Capitale du Libre in Toulouse, Paris Open Source Summit, Drupal meetup…).
It seems easier to convince people that use Chrome to switch to Firefox Nightly than it is to convince Firefox users (except our core community members) to switch to Nightly. My guess is that today our user base which didn’t switch to Chrome didn’t partly because they are conservative and don’t want to change their workflow because it works.