This is my first post regarding 2009 Annual Fundraiser.  It’s been an interesting first three weeks — we’ve had some real success, and we’ve learned what was less successful.  With a huge goal this year, we were very ambitious with our plans:

1) Host our own credit card payment processing.  We felt that many of our donors preferred to use credit cards directly, rather than being shuttled off-site, to donate.
2) Create a new look and feel that more closely resembled the Wiki user experience.  We wanted our donors to feel comfortable giving in a familiar environment.
3) Work with outside marketing/communications support from Fenton Communications and SeaChange Strategies on our messaging, design, and strategy.
4) Allow our chapters to fundraise more successfully in their countries.  For that we introduced a GEO IP location system allowing some donors to see chapter specific donation pages.
5) An aggressive matching gift program to encourage higher value gifts.  Omidyar Network offered to match gifts from $100 to $10,000 this year, up to $500,000.
6) Numerous smaller improvements, like mobile giving, social media outreach, and various cool stuff to come.

Thankfully, all those systems are working well (but not perfectly).  As I write this, we have had a successful run (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics) over the last two weeks.  The blue lines are the 2007 totals, the green are the 2008 totals, and the orange are 2009 totals by day of the fundraiser.  Hold your mouse over any bar to see the exact dates, number of donors, and donation totals for each day.

Much like last year, we continue to test many different elements to find ways to appeal to our donors.  During the fundraiser, we will be (and have been) testing the following elements:

• Site Notice messaging (Personal Appeal vs. Slogans vs. Emotional vs. Statistical etc.)
• Site Notice text, bolding, font size, placement.
• Thermometer vs. No Thermometer
• Donate Button vs. No Donate Button
• Landing Pages
• Ask Strings
• Personal Appeals
• And much more.

Each test takes time and technical effort to implement and track and we will attempt to provide detail into those tests as we can.

We largely finished our testing of ask strings on our landing pages.

This landing page has an ask string starting with $35 and going up to $100.
This one has an ask string starting with $250 and going down to $35.

We tested these compared these significantly during the first few weeks.  We noticed that the page with the larger ask string had about a $1 higher average donation with about the same number of transactions.

I hope to be able to share more of our findings about our other landing pages (Change the World and 5 Facts) and site notices (Wikipedia Needs You, Wikipedia Forever, & others) later in the month.

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation

We’re excited to learn today that the Webby Awards have chosen Wikipedia as one of the ten most influential “Internet moments of the decade.” The timing is excellent as we’re now well-underway with our 6th annual fundraising drive.  It’s a great time to think about the extraordinary efforts of thousands of volunteers to make Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to make a donation to help ensure Wikipedia forever.

Alongside the other major hallmarks of a decade of the web, including protests in Iran, the 2008 presidential election, the expansion of craigslist, and the debut of the iPhone, Wikipedia is profiled – highlighting early beginnings in 2001 with 20,000 articles and 18 languages to its status today as a top-five web property used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Thanks to the Webby’s for such esteemed recognition, and congrats to the other big projects and story-makers of the year. Here’s to another big decade of influencing the web and promoting free knowledge!

Jay Walsh, Head of communications

Lots of people love Wikipedia, but surprisingly few know it’s run by a non-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation has just one purpose: to support the free and open sharing of knowledge. We don’t sell information and we don’t accept advertising.  Your donation is what makes Wikipedia possible.

When Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001, it was just an experiment. Nobody imagined Wikipedia would really succeed — least of all, probably, Jimmy.  He just thought it would be interesting to try.

But now, fewer than 10 years later, the number of people who use Wikipedia has grown to 330 million.  Students, teachers, tourists, entrepreneurs, parents, job-hunters, retired people, doctors, artists, engineers — everywhere around the world.  We use Wikipedia because it’s free, it’s convenient, and it gives us the information we’re looking for.  It’s always there when we want it.

This fundraising campaign offers Wikipedia readers the opportunity to celebrate Wikipedia and protect it for the future — for yourself, and for everyone else.

I’m aiming this year to raise 7.5 million dollars, up from five million last year.  That money will go towards technology and people — the servers and bandwidth required to operate the site, and the staff of 30 people who keep it running. You can find more information about how the money is spent, here.

There are some changes in the campaign this year.

• For the first time, you can give through your cellphone.  Just text WIKI to 25383 to make a ten dollar donation that’ll be charged to your phone bill. Currently this will only work for US cellphones, but in future we’ll expand it beyond the US.
• There are also buttons and badges you can put on your own site to encourage your friends to donate.
• Now you can donate via credit card, without having to enter the PayPal site. (For some people, the PayPal branding has been a deterrent — they thought they might need to join PayPal to donate.) To give easily without joining PayPal, using your VISA, Mastercard, American Express or Discover card, go here.

You can stay up-to-date on the campaign by checking back here at the Wikimedia Foundation blog, where Wikimedia’s Head of Community Gifts Rand Montoya will be giving regular updates.  On Identi.ca and Twitter, you can look for, and use yourself, @wikipedia and @wikimedia.

Thank you so much for using Wikipedia.

Since 2001, people around the world have joined together to create the greatest collection of shared knowledge in human history.  We are united by our love of knowledge, by our sense of curiosity and discovery, and by the understanding that we know more together than any one of us could possibly know alone.  Please donate to support Wikipedia, and everything it stands for.

Sue Gardner
Executive Director

How would you make this button better?

We have begun exploring ideas for enhancing the visibility of a donate button, not only within Wikipedia and the Wikimedia main template, but also on every page of every Wikimedia project. We hope that enhancement will enable us to better informing our public that we are dependent on their donations as we promote the free and open knowledge movement.

As we saw in the last fundraiser, different messages and visual styles had different outcomes: different levels of gifts, origin of donors, and frequency of donations.  We expect that a small change to the Wikimedia design template will result in a big returns in donations — increasing funds we use to keep the Wikimedia movement alive and growing.  We expect that in return for a bit of enhanced visibility, we will see a daily increase of up to 20% in donations.

Working with the same designer that worked on last year’s donation page, we have culled his 30+ button ideas into 6 that represent some of the better designs.

We have posted several design options for your comments and input.

Design is only half of this change… words are equally important.   We are also looking for input on messaging on the donate button and on most Wikimedia articles.  What are the simplest words we can use? Can the text be easily translated into dozens of languages? We need text that will communicate that we are a non-profit and and express the importance of donations in keeping our projects active.

Join the discussions on our donation upgrades page and catch a glimpse of the upcoming improvements to our community fundraising efforts!

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Evoswitch operates a leading, 100% carbon neutral data center.  Free culture, global access to free information, and sustainable, green data centers: it’s a tremendous mission-supporting partnership.  We’d like to thank the great folks at Evoswitch for working with us to support our mission and for helping millions of internet users gain access to our projects.

Jay Walsh, Communications

It’s been a nice few weeks in fundraising for Wikimedia Foundation.  Our users have demonstrated overwhelming support for our projects and our mission.

We’ve more than passed our initial fundraising goal of $6 million (though you are still encouraged to make a donation…bolstering our reserves in preparation for the years ahead is always welcome) with over 130,000 people making a statement for open and free information.

I love being able to say that.  Thank our donors again for their support.

That said, we’ll be taking down the site notices/banners today at 4pm PST.  We’ll be sending out some news next week (approaching the 8th anniversary of Wikipedia) with some new geographic breakdown data about giving.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving<

We will aslo be rotating the site banners on Wikipedia and the other projects later today to point to a new thank you note from Jimmy Wales.

This is a great day for Wikipedia, and for the more than 125,000 supports of the project.  You’ve helped us raise over $6.2million – and we’re still seeing donations come in.  Thank you for showing extraordinary support, and for helping to sustain and grow Wikipedia.

Happy New Year!  What a great way to kick it off.

Jay Walsh, Communications<

A few blog posts back, we proved that people do read our site notices…our messages matter.  So is it so hard to imagine these results?

Fundraiser Snapshot 122908

Yeah… I guess it might be hard to imagine.   Those LONG green lines are the donation totals for Jimmy’s Appeal.  It’s roughly 8 times what we had been raising on a daily basis previous to the appeal.

Date    # Donors    $USD
12/23/08    8,192     $283,994.98

12/24/08    6,823     $229,293.59

12/25/08    5,139     $169,109.73

12/26/08    5,995     $213,963.27

12/27/08    5,791     $200,988.24

12/28/08    5,627     $196,524.30

12/29/08    5,850     $207,349.76

Compare those results to the recent weeks (when we were averaging about $30,000 per day), the biggest change is running the Jimmy Appeal at 50% of the time.

Site Notice Frequency 12/20/08 to 12/22/08:

There Need it Meter: 25%
Rely on donations Meter: 25%
Wikipedia is a Non Profit: 25%
Various Quotes:  25%

And from 12/23 to present:

Jimmy Appeal Red Border:  25%
Jimmy Appeal Grey Border:  25%
There Need it Meter: 10%
Rely on donations Meter: 10%
Wikipedia is a Non Profit: 10%
Various Quotes:  20%

Incidentally, how did the grey bordered vs. red bordered vs. quotes and other site notices do?

# donations        sum           average
red border            13,372      $441,163.75     $32.99       25%
grey border          12,215       $419,911.63     $34.38       25%
quotes                     1,560        $59,445.81     $37.69       20%
Helped Meter           963        $35,814.23     $37.19       10%
Need it Meter           927        $32,502.97     $35.06      10%
NonProfit Meter      867        $38,412.25     $44.30      10%

Nope… no doubt.   The Jimmy Appeal was a huge push.

The Appeal really hit the right notes for our community:  direct and honest.  It was straight to the point and forceful.  And it helped our donors understand why we needed the money and what we were going to do with it.

As I write this, we’re at approximately $5,500,000.00 and still going strong toward our $6 million goal.   That’s with over 100,000 donors (many of them new donors) averaging over $30.00 per donation.   That speaks very well for the depth of our donor pool and the future.

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

<

Today marked the single most active fundraising day since the beginning of our campaign, and maybe in the history of fundraising at Wikimedia. People have come out in great numbers, and with a great total: Over $283K USD was raised in one day, from 8,186 donations!  That’s up from 800 contributions yesterday – or an 892% increase in the number of donations  (see the green spike):

Why the jump? It can very likely be attributed to the intro of our banner inviting users to read a donation appeal letter from founder Jimmy Wales:

This is a tremendous gesture from all the supporters of Wikipedia from around the world. A huge thanks to all of you – here’s to a few more days like today so we can keep pushing for our $6million goal!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

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<