Wow!  We’ve just closed the most successful fundraiser in the history of the Wikimedia Foundation thanks to our  amazing donors. Over 230,000 people came together and showed their support for our project and mission: to provide free and open knowledge to everyone around the world. Thank you!

Again, we’re ending our annual fundraiser early due to the overwhelming and rapid support from everyone.   We’ve hit and surpassed our fundraising goal of $7.5 million, raising over $8 million in just two months.

Even more, we’re humbled by the fact that during serious global economic stress, folks were still willing to help out and contribute.  More than 230,000 donors have shown that they want Wikipedia to continue to be a place for free and open information.  More than 230,000 have joined together to keep Wikipedia free of ads.  We are extremely grateful for your generosity.

I cannot say enough about how amazing the steadfast support from everyone has been: our donors, our contributors, our chapters; everyone involved directly influenced the immense success of this year’s effort. Again, a huge thank you from me and everyone from the Wikimedia Foundation.  We look forward to sharing some more detailed findings about this year’s fundraiser in the coming weeks.

Happy New Year,

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Hey All–

First and foremost, a big thank you to all our donors, community, and supporters for all the time & money given to this Annual Fundraiser.  The Wikimedia Foundation would not exist without the support and goodwill of our community.

We have some more statistics and information to share with everyone about the great success of this year’s fundraiser.

As you all can see, our progress this year has been pretty darn good.   Our “Jimmy Appeal” is working quite well, making $430,000 on its first full day up, and another $345,000 on the second.  This picture (from WMF techie Trevor Parscal) probably shows it best:  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:FundraiserStatistics-Blog.jpg.    I hope to discuss that in a future blog post.

Secondly, a long awaited link: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionTrackingStatistics.  This is part of the data that we use to evaluate site notice performance.  You will see the number of donations, total donations, and largest gifts for our different site notices for each day.  Eventually, we would like to put out all the data for all fundraising dates; however, due to processing limitations, we can only have one week of data available.

Landing pages names Support, Support2, and Appeal2 are different types of pre-payment pages.  Sometimes we test different versions to compare results.   For the current Jimmy Appeal, most donors are randomly shunted to either (Appeal ==> Support2) or (Appeal2). We are comparing those results for future campaigns.  In the past, we also tested 5Facts and Change the World landing pages.   PP = donations made via Paypal and CC = credit card payment through our new credit card gateway.   You can also sort by column by clicking on the sort arrows.

Thirdly, I think I need to admit that I’ll never have a perfect understanding of how well any particular site notice will do.  I can suspect that certain ones will do well, or certain ones will fail, but I’m constantly reminded that the donation data from our users never quite aligns with what I expect.

For instance, we developed a banner based on this donor quote:

“I couldn’t ignore that banner at the top of the site anymore… I use Wikipedia far too often to ignore the need!”

To me, it’s too long and a bit awkwardly phrased.  I did not think it would hold up well to sweet, simple, short phrases we’ve tried in the past.   I do acknowledge that it has some humor and poignancy behind it.

The results?

2009_Notice42 did incredibly well.  “Crushing all in it’s path” (this is before the onset of the Jimmy Appeal) would be more accurate, but the message is drawing in a number of donors.  Running at 20% of English page views with 5 other banners in rotation, the results are glaring:

Now, why do you think it’s working so well?   Is it a combination of previous messages?  What other messages do you think would work well?

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Hey All–

We’ve been tracking a huge amount of data during this year’s fundraiser so we can better understand which messages work well and which don’t.  We have two sets of banners that we set each day to run on all Wikipedia languages.  Set one is the English version; set two is all non-English versions.

We have two sets because we want our banners to run globally only if they are translated…which can take some time and volunteer effort.  This is why our non-English banners rotate slowly.  However, with English banners, we can build a banner quickly and put it up to see how it does.

Let’s go into some detail on selecting a rotation.  On December 3rd, our rotation and results (pp = Paypal, cc = credit card):

As you can see, we had three different notices running at 20% and one banner, taken from one of the better notices from 2008′s fundraiser, 2009_Notice30_bold running at 40%.  It did well throughout last week.

As you can see, 2009_Notice18 pulled in a huge number of gifts despite only showing 20% of the time.   Also, it had a significantly lower average gift…probably as a result of the message itself.   Despite the low average gift, people seemed to really respond to the message…and donated lots.

We are wary of banner-fatigue and saturation, where users might be tired of seeing the same message, so we changed banners around for the next day.

Looking at December 4th, 2009:

We introduced 2009_Notice40 (“Thanks, Wikipedia.”) to the mix and cut back on another.   All five banners in rotation are at 20%.  Two of the banners are greatly outperforming the others.  We like what #40 is doing…but #18 is still rocking…1001 donations while the next closest is 507 donations (#40).

Again, we switched things up, removing #17, and adding 2009_Notice22, a similar, but opposite message to #18, which has been successful.

December 5th, 2009:

This day is a fascinating look at our banners and our user population.  Notice the results of #18 and #22…they are similar yet contrasting messages.   #18 is an quote from a small dollar donation (USD 1.95), acknowledging the sincerity of the gift.  #22 is a quote from a high dollar donation (USD 200),  emphasizing that a big gift is a small matter.

Compare the numbers of gifts for the two banners:

#18: 832 gifts, $15073.47 total
#22: 301 gifts, $9572.83 total

Not close right?  But look at the average gift sizes:

#18:  $15.84 for Paypal, $21.87 for credit card
#22:  $27.92 for Paypal, $36.58 for credit card

That’s quite a difference.  What was it about the message that would account for that?  Is it possible that our more affluent donors were more interested in #22, while other donors were affected by #18?

Post your thoughts below.

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation

Hey All–

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

Today, I’m excited to announce the kick-off of Wikimedia’s annual fundraising campaign.

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