Admittedly, this is a year of growth and testing for the Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team. We have 4 new members and the Annual Fundraiser is a new experience for all of us. In fact, I’m not sure how many fundraising projects have had this kind of reach (250+ million unique viewers in November).  This provides us with an amazing opportunity to test different pitches through our site notices. With the fundraiser reaching a huge audience, we knew we had a great chance to test different messages and see what works and what doesn’t.

We started the Annual Fundraiser on November 3rd with 4 site notices (the big banners across the top of every Wiki article). Our tech team worked to track each notice and each notice had a randomized 25% chance of displaying on any given article (on every Wikipedia, in localized languages, and in other other Wikimedia projects). In theory, every notice had the same number of views. You can see the 4 site notices here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2008/design_drafts.

Now, which notices do you think did the best? The results are surprising:

People love to click on the links with the thermometer…but less than 10% donated after clicking-though. However, it’s interesting to see the strength of the “Wikipedia is there when you need it — now it needs you” message. While it had significantly less clicks, nearly 17% of people donated after clicking on it.

What do you make of that? What other conclusions would you draw?

And what do you think our next test should be?

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving<

Today, we are 11 days into the 2008 Annual Giving Campaign…it’s been quite an exciting experience. You’ve probably seen the site notices up on just about every Wiki-project page and almost every language. Our volunteers and tech team have worked overtime to get everything working. We’ve had an amazing response from the community (This page still stuns me and I spend far too much time refreshing it).

After 11 days last year, we had 10,599 donors who gave $289,091.08 in total.

After 11 days this year, we have 22,736 donors who have given $629,825.92 in total.

Those are some nice numbers and we’ll be working to make sure that they continue. But to see that type of progress reminds me of one of the things I’ve heard more often than anything else related to my work at Wikimedia was/is: “What? Wikipedia is a non-profit?”

People don’t seem to know yet how dependent the Wikimedia Foundation is on the goodwill of our community. This year, community gifts (donations of less than $10,000) are expected to make up nearly half of our $6 million budget. Part of our strategy this year is to emphasize our charitable status and make a case to our users that they can help us maintain and promote the free knowledge movement.

And, to date, they have. And that’s pretty exciting.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Today we are very pleased to announce the kick-off for the 2008 Annual Giving Campaign for the Wikimedia Foundation. For most Wikipedia users that means you’re now seeing a shiny banner at the top of every Wikipedia page – likewise for the other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The campaign will run through January 15, 2009 – which will mark the eight birthday of Wikipedia. We’ve increased our goal this year to $6million USD – it’s ambitious, but with more resources to spread the word and help bring in donations, we’re confident we’ll get there and beyond.

To make things run smoothly we’ve rebuilt the entire front-end of the donation system at donate.wikimedia.org, and we’ve streamlined the Wikipedia donation banners. Live comments from donors return, and we’ve also added a series of standard ‘Support Wikipedia’ buttons. We’re also encouraging fans and users to remix the Wikipedia puzzle mark to show support in their own way.

For the podcasters or internet/traditional radio folks out there we’ve also produced a series of audio public service announcements in varying lengths, and in broadcast quality formats.

Last (but not least) we’ve created a form so anyone can share their stories about how Wikipedia has made their lives easier. This is the perfect time to reflect on the impact Wikipedia has had on your life – and you’ll help us build our understanding of how Wikipedia is being used by people every day. We’ll be sharing your stories here on the blog.

A huge thank-you to our ongoing and new donors – your donation will support global access to free knowledge, and a long, healthy future for Wikipedia.

Here’s to a successful campaign!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

In December 2007, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation formally decided to ask the Free Software Foundation, which administers the GNU Free Documentation License under which Wikipedia is distributed, to release a new version of the license which will allow Wikimedia to switch its content to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA). The underlying motivation of this change is that CC-BY-SA is an easier-to-use license granting the same essential freedoms as the GFDL. It is also more widely used by other educational projects, and switching the license would allow Wikimedia wikis to freely share content with those projects.

We’re very pleased that the Free Software Foundation has today released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License which implements this requested change. Next, the Wikimedia Foundation will organize a community wide referendum to decide whether existing GFDL wikis should be made availabe under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

We are deeply grateful to the Free Software Foundation for making this change. I’ve posted a more in-depth summary of what it means on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, and an energetic discussion on the topic has already begun. We will post more details on this topic soon.

See also:

• Free Software Foundation FAQ on the FDL 1.3 release
• Creative Commons blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by CC VP Mike Linksvayer
• Blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig

Erik Möller
Deputy Director<