Jeremy Tobacman wrote:
Fundraising stats and figures are still up from the previous drives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia/Fundraising Can anyone lend me a hand with the formatting of the raw data? If so, I can extend the figures to cover the last few months and provide frequent updates during any new drives.
On 5/25/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Ant (if that is what she meant) that the "personal appeal" should probably show up for anonymous users on all wikis. It would be even nicer if that message would change regularly.
These sound like good ideas. To me they also suggest a question: How can we figure out what fundraising tactics are actually the most effective? I propose that we run some "randomized evaluations," eg, by randomly varying the fundraising appeal that gets served to some visitors to the site. The randomization could be done based on the time of the page request, the IP, or something else. Then we could compare the contributions made by people who received different appeals, and subsequently focus on the ones that worked best.
Jeremy _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
That's a great suggestion and long overdue. We should organize our public fundraising approaches more professionally and really study what is and isn't effective. If we can improve the effectiveness, we can have shorter or less frequent fundraisers. Currently our non-fundraiser donation rate is close to our operating expense thus allowing us to spread out our fundraisers. It's still not enough to sustain the operation when we consider our capital expenditures.
Michael