On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 14:50, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
Fabricating a sense of urgency that donations are immediately necessary at the end of the campaign to keep the projects operational and freely available (ie, "Please help Wikipedia pay its bills in 2012" [1], "Last day to make a tax-deductible contribution to keep Wikipedia free in 2012" [2], etc) is as unethical now as it was in last year's campaign ("Please donate to keep Wikipedia free" in the banner you linked to [3], etc).
This discussion about blinking banners might seem trivial but it serves as a very obvious reminder, in style now as well as substance, of the disjoint between the fundraising team's work and the norms and ethos of the community and projects.
Would it be an idea to have some kind of RfC or something like that on Meta where community members could come up with a list of things we roughly agree are the limits for fundraising.
I think the fundraising team have done really well, but there have been a few things we really need to fix for next year, starting with the limits that the community are comfortable with regarding banner length, tone, graphical style etc.
The other thing I think we really need to fix before next year is making clear to OTRS volunteers exactly what the right channels and actions are to handle fundraiser-related emails. And maybe it would be useful if we could go through fundraiser-related emails in OTRS and somehow tag the feedback into categories (perhaps on OTRS Wiki) and then give back to the community some statistics about how many complaints and emails we have had about fundraising and what the nature of those complaints and emails are so the Foundation and community can better tune the banners and fundraising for next year.
On a subjective level, there's lots of things I've seen in e-mail from people: they would like to buy a t-shirt rather than donate (the Foundation really need to sort out merchandise - other similar non-profits like Mozilla Foundation, Creative Commons and so on have really nailed merchandise), they want SMS donations in various European countries, they want it so that if they've donated it removes the banner for the rest of the fundraiser.