Last week Mozilla’s marketing team launched a new community-focused marketing challenge called Impact Mozilla. The idea is to further open Mozilla’s marketing process to the community, and see who can come up with the best ideas. This challenge is specifically focused on gathering and developing ideas that will help increase Firefox’s user retention rate — which is to say increasing the number of people who continue using Firefox after downloading and installing it.

“We’re looking for innovative ways to make sure people who download Firefox become regular users. Interested? Start by sending us a summary of your ideas and an oveview of how you and your team will carry them out. If your initial strategy makes the cut, we’ll ask for a complete plan detailing your solution. If your plan is selected as the winner, you’ll have the opportunity to manage a marketing campaign for one of the top brands in the technology world. We’ll give you the resources to enact your solution, plus $3,000 for the winning proposal.” For all the details, including how to get started and where to submit your plans, see the Impact Mozilla website.

Part of the Firefox 3 launch included a t-shirt contest in which we “open sourced” the design process to create the official Firefox 3 t-shirt. Not only did we get a fantastic winning shirt, we also received a huge number of other great designs. There’s been a growing demand to make more of these community designs available for purchase, so for the past few months the Marketing team has been sorting out the legal and logistical challenges to make this possible. Tara Shahain has recently announced the good news: “[W]e’ve partnered with Zazzle.com to create the ‘Mozilla Community Store’ – a sidekick to the original Mozilla Store which will serve as a new and open channel for community generated products. The Community Store isn’t quite finished yet, but I hope to have it ready in the next month or so. Make sure to start thinking of your designs! Once it launches, we’ll have plenty of details to help guide you through the entire process. Stay tuned!” More information about this project is available on Tara’s weblog.