On 3 December 2014 at 14:09, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
Dear WMF Fundraising team, please do not take this thread (or this email) as an attack on yourselves or the professionalism that you apply to your work.
I would suspect that what drives this is indeed the professionalism of the Fundraising team. I don't mean to be overly speculative, but what we are talking about here is an issue that doesn't readily translate into metrics. Creating and gathering metrics for "damage to the Wikipedia brand" would be extremely difficult and expensive. On the other hand, creating and gathering metrics for "the number/amount/... of donations received" is easy and cheap. Relatedly, "damage to the Wikipedia brand" is not something the impact of which you feel directly, while "the number/amount/... of donations received" is something that immediately translates into WMF's budget.
So I assume the Fundraising team is in a somewhat uncomfortable position here. Getting them to change the way they run the campaigns might, in this case, really not work on its own; rather, in my view, any decision on this likely has to come from the very top of the Foundation (those that Fundraising reports to), who, to some degree, have to place their gut feeling over the implications derived from the available/feasible set of hard quantitative metrics.
Cheers, Patrik