Our annual fundraising campaign reached a successful conclusion today having raised a record-breaking USD 20 million from more than one million donors in nearly every country in the world. It is our most successful campaign ever, continuing an unbroken streak in which donations have risen every year since the campaigns began in 2003.

Wikimedia Foundation websites serve more than 470 million people every month. It is the only major website supported not by advertising, but by donations from readers.

From Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation,

Our model is working fantastically well.

Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive. That maintains our independence and lets us focus solely on providing a useful public service. I am so grateful to our donors for making that possible. I promise them we will use their money carefully and well.

The number of Wikimedia Foundation donors has increased ten-fold since 2008 and the total dollar amount raised in the campaign has risen to over $20 million from $4.5 million.

Funds raised in this campaign will be used to buy and install servers and other hardware, to develop new site functionality, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects, and support the large global community of Wikimedia volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation’s total 2011-12 planned spending is 28.3 million USD. The bulk of that is raised during the annual campaign and the remainder comes throughout the year in the form of grants from institutions (such as the Sloan Foundation) and many other small donations year round.

This year’s campaign highlighted staff and volunteers who help to create Wikipedia. It featured testimonials from volunteer editors in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States ranging in age from 18 to 76, explaining why they edit Wikipedia and why they think readers should support the Wikimedia Foundation. More than 100 volunteers translated the banners and appeals into dozens of languages, reaching hundreds of millions of people.

A special thanks goes to all the contributors who work on the fundraiser year-round, the editors who helped tell their story, the translators who helped spread the message of the fundraiser, Wikimedia foundation employees, and to the readers of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for their support.

With over 20 million articles in 282 languages, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in human history. Over 100,000 volunteers work on Wikipedia and its 10 sister projects (including projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, and Wiktionary), furthering the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to freely share the sum of all human knowledge. On January 15, 2012, Wikipedia will celebrate its 11th anniversary.

Jay Walsh, Communications

The Wikimedia fundraiser is facilitated by two things: Banners and appeals. The banners appear at the top of the site, featuring a picture of someone from the Wikimedia movement (Jimmy, our founder, an editor, reader, or donor), and the words, “Please read: A personal appeal from Wikimedia (Founder|Editor|Reader) So and So.”

Clicking the banner lands you on a donation form featuring a letter from the person in the banner. A lot of fundraising experts have told us this is a dumb way to fundraise. They say people don’t read the appeals, and that surely there’s something better we could run in the banners other than “Please read a personal appeal.”

We’ve tested the appeal pages against simple donation forms with no appeals, with basic facts, and slogans, and nothing has performed better than the appeals. We’re happy about that, because we love that the fundraiser serves a double purpose of educating our 470 million readers about how Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement work.

But we’re unhappy that we haven’t been able to find anything better than “Please read a personal appeal” for our banners. It’s not for lack of trying. We’ve tested more than 100 different banner phrases. And we’ve tested a few non-human images (e.g. hands holding the Wikipedia globe logo).

Only one banner has occasionally beaten “Please read a personal appeal,” and that is: “If everyone reading this donated $5, we could end the fundraiser today.” But that banner seems to set the expectation that the fundraiser is about to end soon, so we only like to use that at the end of the campaign.

Last year, we asked the Wikimedia community to suggest banners and tested many of them. None came close to beating “personal appeal.” This year, though, thanks to a tool created by friends at Princeton University, we have a new way to revisit those ideas, and bring in some new ones, for testing.

Professor Salganik and his research group are the developers of All Our Ideas, an open source platform for public participation. It enables groups to collect and prioritize information in a way that is democratic, transparent, and efficient, and it has already been used by governments and non-profit organizations around the world.

He approached us about using this tool for choosing new banners to test and we said we would like to try it. You can go there now and start voting on banners at:

http://www.allourideas.org/wikipedia-banner-challenge

We’ll be watching the results and will test the ones that come out on top in the voting. We’ve helped to seed the tool with banners proposed by the community last year. We were not able to test all of the ideas suggested then. We will test at least a handful of the ones that come out on top in this voting process that haven’t been tested before — as long as they are in line with the spirit and values of the Wikimedia movement.

There is also a way to propose new ideas — and new images — for banners using the All Our Ideas tool.

Finally, one thing I should explain is why we’re looking for a better banner. Each year, we only raise what we need and then end the fundraiser. If a better banner brings double the number of donors from our best current banner, then we can cut the duration of the fundraiser in half — and that would be a very good thing.

Today we were very pleased to announce another amazing grant from the US based Stanton Foundation, and our largest grant yet.  The grant totals $3.6 million USD, and will fund major investments in the technology infrastructure that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects – specifically to serve our growing readership.

On the grant, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner offered the following:

The Stanton Foundation is a long-time funder of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I am thrilled they’re increasing their investment in us. The Stanton Foundation was one of the first institutions to recognize that Wikipedia is a serious educational endeavour that’s having a significant impact on people around the world. I will always be grateful to them for taking a risk in first funding us, many years ago.

The Stanton Foundation was created by the American broadcasting executive and media pioneer Frank Stanton, who, in 1960, organized the first-ever televised presidential debate. Among its previous grants to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Stanton Foundation provided $1.2 million in 2010 for the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative, a program designed to improve the quality and quantity of information related to public policy topics in Wikipedia. The project resulted in 800 American students at universities such as Harvard and University of California Berkeley adding the equivalent of 5,800 printed pages of material to Wikipedia, and has now been expanded to include universities in Canada and India.

Our heartfelt thanks to the Stanton Foundation for helping us bring Wikipedia and its sister projects to even more people around the world.

Jay Walsh, Communications

On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.

CiviCRM, The Free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector

The sprint was a terrific success. The eight participants squashed many CiviCRM bugs — and the Foundation directly benefited, as they improved CiviCRM contact/contribution search performance by 15 to 25 times! Formerly, it could take more than two minutes for someone to search among the contribution records. The developers’ tweaks, hacks and patches whittled that down to about 4-6 seconds per search. This will save innumerable hours for WMF administrators and fundraisers.

The Foundation’s Arthur Richards, a fundraising engineer, enthused: “Any software tool, open source or not, comes with headaches; the beauty of tools like CiviCRM is that we can solve our own problems. Thanks to having some great hackers in one place, we managed to mitigate one of our biggest CiviCRM pain points in a matter of hours.”

You can read more details about the sprint on Donald Lobo’s CiviCRM blog.

Richards was especially excited to “highlight how awesome it is working with other open source projects and using other open source tools. We get to scratch each other’s backs, which helps support a sustainable, healthy ecosystem of software/communities. Also, using open source tools like CiviCRM – while not without their (often big) pain points – is great because we can fix the software ourselves. While the tools are free to use, with a little bit of elbow grease and some resources, they can be molded and fixed to meet our needs much easier (and likely much cheaper) than relying on proprietary tools. Plus, the CiviCRM community has been instrumental in helping us troubleshoot, solve problems and add new features to meet our usage requirements.”

The CiviCRM community is planning to run another code sprint in the fall in Northern California; please contact them if you’d like to participate or even host it. In the meantime, Wikimedia and thousands of other nonprofits will enjoy the CiviCRM improvements developed in May.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

I’m delighted to report that the Wikimedia Foundation can ring in the New Year with the close of our seventh annual fundraiser, having exceeded our goal of $16 million. More than half a million people pitched in an average of around $22 each to support Wikipedia and its sister projects, in our shortest (and most successful) fundraiser to date.

Our community of volunteers is deeply honored that, in only 50 days, 500,000 people from 140 countries came together to support the only non-profit, user supported top-10 website in the world.  In addition to this humbling support for the Wikimedia Foundation, our chapters around the world have raised millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of donors of their own.

We want to thank every one of our donors for making this year a success, and on behalf of the fundraising team, I personally wish to thank the one-thousand community members who helped us create and test messages, who wrote appeals, and translated banners and letters into over 80 languages.

In 15 days, Wikipedia will turn 10 years old. Since the beginning, Wikipedia’s community of readers and editors have remained dedicated to keeping the site ad-free, and free for use for its 400 million monthly visitors.  This year’s success demonstrates a continued commitment to those principles.

With the close of our annual fundraiser, we are transitioning into the contribution phase of the campaign. We will be running banners for the next few days to thank everyone who came together in the spirit of creating and “effectively disseminating the sum of human knowledge available for all.”  We will also begin to celebrate Wikipedia’s tenth birthday, with banner ads encouraging readers to join us in a local celebration.

We want to invite every one of the readers of Wikipedia and its sister sites to make their  first edit, or upload their first photograph, and join our community of volunteer contributors to continue the growth of Wikipedia for the next 10 years.

Thank you again, and happy New Year! Here’s to 2011, and to the next 10 years!

Regards,

Philippe Beaudette
Head of Reader Relations

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.

Wikimedia’s contribution campaign for 2010 is a serious endeavor. As Philippe told you yesterday, in a relatively short time period we need to raise the funds that keep Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects available for free to everyone.

Millions of people use Wikipedia every day. It’s clear that more than a few of our readers have noticed yesterday’s launch. Nearly all of the responses we find are constructive for thinking about how to keep Wikipedia free. Some of them are simply hilarious. Too hilarious not to share, in fact.

Here’s our list of the best, or rather the most amusing, tidbits about this year’s fundraiser. We’re glad we’re not the only folks with a healthy sense of humor. We consider this post to be in the tradition of Wikipedia humor, of which a favorite example is Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.

• Thanks to a link from O’Reilly Radar, Information is Beautiful created a rather stunning infographic about our appeals. Not to be outdone, Flowing Data has their own take.
• The Huffington Post also has a smart rundown on our banner testing strategy, and includes a poll where you can choose which of two banners you prefer.
• Time.com’s Techland blog declared Jimmy’s expression “Don Draper-esque.” We’re unofficially declaring that a win for Wikipedia’s cool factor.
• A blogger from Indiana wrote a satire which expresses another strong but nevertheless funny reaction to the banners.
• New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog has a short but sweet post that reminds readers of the somewhat surprising list of Wikipedia’s most popular articles.
• The community at social news site Reddit has several hysterical threads about the campaign, including Photoshop jokes and unfortunate coincidences. The same Reddit posts often have practical advice for how to help us improve the donation system.

Of course, Twitter is awash with 140 character analysis of the campaign so far. There’s really too much to link to, but choice examples include:

• Jeff Atwood of stackoverflow.com fame feeling a tad uncomfortable
• Insight into Chuck Norris-related vandalism
• Commentary on the reliability of Wikipedia
• And a gentleman who apparently feels a little guilty about the size of his donation. Hopefully he knows that our average gift isn’t over $30 USD, as you can see at our public donation statistics page.

If you’d like to keep up on similar unofficial news from our contribution campaign, please follow the #keepitfree hashtag on Twitter. For a more official take, follow @Wikipedia and @Wikimedia. Visit donate.wikimedia.org to do your part to sustain the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Steven Walling, on behalf of Wikimedia’s Community Department

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our 2010 annual fundraising drive, which we are referring to as a ”contribution campaign”. This year marks a major milestone for Wikipedia.  Ten years of revolutionizing access to knowledge.  Ten years of our joint commitment to deliver the sum of human knowledge to every human being on the planet.  For free.

Wikipedia and its sister sites champion a mission of effectively disseminating knowledge, free for use, free of copyright, and free of external advertising. Since its founding in 2001, the site has grown to 17 million articles in over 270 languages, and for many of those languages, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia ever written. Wikipedia, and all the Wikimedia projects, are always there when we need them; for students, educators, professionals and curious minds worldwide, these projects are simply the most convenient and readily accessible sources of information.

This year’s fundraising goal is an ambitious one – $16 million over two months. Wikimedia sites are the 5^th most visited web properties worldwide (visited by about 400 million people each month), and Wikimedia is the only non-profit organization in the top 10. Since 2007 our readership has doubled, with this past September seeing our highest traffic yet.  With this incredible feat comes an enormous duty: to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep these sites free, stable, and running smoothly, while also continually improving the systems and architecture behind them.

For more information about where your donations go, see this year’s annual plan.

Since the beginning, our fundraising model has been based on the support of our community of readers and editors – we have received more than 500,000 donations in the lifetime of the Foundation, averaging about $33 each.  Will you join us today by making a donation to financially underwrite Wikipedia and its sister sites?

We have worked with almost a thousand community volunteers to develop this year’s fundraiser as a community driven contribution campaign. These exceptional volunteers have helped to develop messaging, design banners, write appeals, and conduct tests of our ideas.

Since August we have been testing these messages and tweaking our campaign to reflect the data and feedback from our community. Due to the introduction of new technology, we now have the ability to target particular banners and donation pages based upon geographic location, and to optimize the pages donors see.

In addition to new technology, we’re introducing a new perspective;  this year’s contribution campaign is designed to invite not only financial contributions, but to also encourage people to contribute their expertise and knowledge to the projects. We want readers to make their first edit, upload their first photograph to Wikimedia Commons, write their first article, and through this, to become more deeply affiliated with the projects.

For updates throughout the fundraiser continue to check our blog, and follow us on identi.ca and Twitter (as @Wikipedia, or the community-run contribution handle @WikiContribute).  After you’ve made a contribution, please tell the world using the hashtag #keepitfree!

This year marks a significant milestone for us, so I hope you will join me – and the diverse community of volunteers that make up the Wikimedia projects – in celebrating and supporting the mission that has brought us all together.

Stay curious!

Philippe Beaudette,
Community Department

Last Thursday October 7th, more than one hundred Wikipedia editors, donors, and readers gathered in New York City for Inside the Globe, a celebration of the dynamic community that has helped build the world’s largest free-knowledge resource.

Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia Foundation fellowship recipient Steven Walling presented a talk regarding the identity and culture of the most involved editors, highlighting the motivations and methods behind their amazing accomplishments within the project. Founder Jimmy Wales also spoke about the enormous impact of Wikipedia and the importance of continued support.

Wikipedia is a truly collaborative project, with individuals each doing their part to provide everyone with free access to the sum of all knowledge. It was wonderful to be able to bring some of them together, and inspiring to know that there are many more out there all around the world. Thank you all for being a part of this community.

Many thanks to Ruth Ann and Bill Harnisch of The Harnisch Foundation for generously sponsoring this event.

Steven Ma, Community Department