Hi Seddon,
By "And in this instance although the test was successful, we had decided that although a winner, it was the lessons to take away that were more important. From there we hope to arrive at a banner that draws from the success but is delivered in a way that is easier on the eye." are you saying that you've decided to discontinue the inline fundraising but will use lessons learned from it to design banners?
By the way, I thought that some of the WMF folks on Facebook had a good idea when they suggested the "I <3 Wikipedia" frames on peoples' profile pictures. That brings to mind that in a previous round of fundraising that WMF had banners with Wikimedians' photos and some fundraising messages that I believe were written by them. Perhaps you could consider bringing back a version of that campaign.
I believe that there is some tradeoff in the length of the campaign and the boldness of the fundraising, so to a certain extent I'm reluctantly willing to accept bold fundraising if that means that the campaign ends sooner.
I feel strongly that the campaign should stick to 100% of its stated target, not intentionally overshoot the target for purposes of padding the reserves. When WMF says that its goal is $X, then it should end the campaign when it has high certainty that it has reached $X. If that means that a campaign ends a week early, so much the better.
Thanks,
Pine