I have another money-making idea for the foundation, which is the setting up of a "Pledge bank".
This ties in with my earlier direct debit/standing order suggestion but is even more voluntary.
The concept is people sign a pledge to donate an amount to Wikimedia either every month, every quarter, bi-annually or annually. For example, someone pledges $5 per month to support the Foundation. They fill in details on a form and every month the Foundation sends them a polite reminder with a quick link to the donate page with the amount filled in.
This is aimed at providing a more steady stream of income from project supporters, the periodic emails can document items like project milestones and the like to encourage fulfilling the pledge, but it remains optional. You're not spamming people for money, you offer a very easy opt-out, but you do end up with people who believe in the various project goals giving small amounts frequently.
Thoughts?
Brian McNeil
The concept is people sign a pledge to donate an amount to Wikimedia either every month, every quarter, bi-annually or annually. For example, someone pledges $5 per month to support the Foundation. They fill in details on a form and every month the Foundation sends them a polite reminder with a quick link to the donate page with the amount filled in.
That could work. I think it is important that we try and move away from discrete fundraisers and try and get donations year round, and voluntary reminders to donate could work well.
I have no idea how you'd word it, but a certificate like the donation gift cert. would be a good thing to go with a pledge bank. People can print out a document that says "I am committed to donating $x per month to Wikimedia to spread access to knowledge."
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: 22 November 2007 13:49 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Pledge bank
The concept is people sign a pledge to donate an amount to Wikimedia
either
every month, every quarter, bi-annually or annually. For example, someone pledges $5 per month to support the Foundation. They fill in details on a form and every month the Foundation sends them a polite reminder with a quick link to the donate page with the amount filled in.
That could work. I think it is important that we try and move away from discrete fundraisers and try and get donations year round, and voluntary reminders to donate could work well.
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On 22/11/2007, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
I have no idea how you'd word it, but a certificate like the donation gift cert. would be a good thing to go with a pledge bank. People can print out a document that says "I am committed to donating $x per month to Wikimedia to spread access to knowledge."
A small banner thing for people to put on userpages, blogs, etc. saying a similar thing would be good (possibly with the option of not specifying the value of the donation - the aim is to get regular donations, not large ones, so we don't want to discourage small donations).
I agree absolutely with this, give people a way to show they are a *committed* supporter of WMF. Perhaps it's something like "I support WMF with regular donations, why don't you?" or "I support WMF with regular donations, click this link and see why you should too".
I really like the idea of having a pledge bank and keeping people who are making regular, albeit small, donations informed about what WMF is up to. If we can say, "Your donations allowed us to run a number of workshops in South Africa. That was 3 months ago, the Africaans Wikipedia has grown by x hundred articles since then." My objective here? You're showing donors that their money is making a difference, even if - with English WP at 2 mill+ articles - they never notice the difference.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: 22 November 2007 14:16 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Pledge bank
On 22/11/2007, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
I have no idea how you'd word it, but a certificate like the donation gift cert. would be a good thing to go with a pledge bank. People can print out
a
document that says "I am committed to donating $x per month to Wikimedia
to
spread access to knowledge."
A small banner thing for people to put on userpages, blogs, etc. saying a similar thing would be good (possibly with the option of not specifying the value of the donation - the aim is to get regular donations, not large ones, so we don't want to discourage small donations).
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I really like the idea of having a pledge bank and keeping people who are making regular, albeit small, donations informed about what WMF is up to. If we can say, "Your donations allowed us to run a number of workshops in South Africa. That was 3 months ago, the Africaans Wikipedia has grown by x hundred articles since then." My objective here? You're showing donors that their money is making a difference, even if - with English WP at 2 mill+ articles - they never notice the difference.
The problem is, most of the money goes on just keeping the servers running, it doesn't go on anything interesting.
Hoi, So it is not interesting that the servers are running and stay that way ... Hmmm Thanks, GerardM
On Nov 22, 2007 8:59 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I really like the idea of having a pledge bank and keeping people who
are
making regular, albeit small, donations informed about what WMF is up
to. If
we can say, "Your donations allowed us to run a number of workshops in
South
Africa. That was 3 months ago, the Africaans Wikipedia has grown by x hundred articles since then." My objective here? You're showing donors
that
their money is making a difference, even if - with English WP at 2 mill+ articles - they never notice the difference.
The problem is, most of the money goes on just keeping the servers running, it doesn't go on anything interesting.
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On 22/11/2007, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, So it is not interesting that the servers are running and stay that way ... Hmmm Thanks, GerardM
No, it's not. It's important, but it's not interesting.
On Nov 23, 2007 12:17 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 22/11/2007, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, So it is not interesting that the servers are running and stay that way ... Hmmm Thanks, GerardM
No, it's not. It's important, but it's not interesting.
It's interesting that an NGO with very little staff can run a top-10-website, I daresay.
Michael
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On 22/11/2007, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
It's interesting that an NGO with very little staff can run a top-10-website, I daresay.
This is something for the whygive blog - "The top 10 website run on string and gaffer tape."
(no I'm not writing it)
- d.
On 22/11/2007, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 23, 2007 12:17 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 22/11/2007, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, So it is not interesting that the servers are running and stay that way ... Hmmm Thanks, GerardM
No, it's not. It's important, but it's not interesting.
It's interesting that an NGO with very little staff can run a top-10-website, I daresay.
Interesting to you and I, certainly. Interesting to a typical donor in a way that is likely to encourage them to donate? I'm not sure... maybe. Nevertheless, general admin is not an interesting thing to say someone's donation was spent on.
On Nov 23, 2007 12:28 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Interesting to you and I, certainly. Interesting to a typical donor in a way that is likely to encourage them to donate?
Well, maybe. I as a donor would find it impressive and highly efficient
I'm not sure... maybe. Nevertheless, general admin is not an interesting thing to say someone's donation was spent on.
It's not general admin, it's our core competency: Keeping the servers up and running.
Michael
On 22/11/2007, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 23, 2007 12:28 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Interesting to you and I, certainly. Interesting to a typical donor in a way that is likely to encourage them to donate?
Well, maybe. I as a donor would find it impressive and highly efficient
"We're running this entire website on a smaller full-time staff than your office IT department".
"We're running this entire website on a smaller full-time staff than your office IT department".
That sums it up pretty well. It does run the risk of people thinking that means we don't need much money, and therefore don't donate. It's difficult to get the balance right between saying how efficiently we spend money and saying how we need lots of money - the two seem, at first glance, to be mutually exclusive (they're obviously not in our case - we're just doing so much that however efficiently you spend the money, you still need a lot of it - but it still seems that way).
I'm curious, the "pledge bank" idea has provoked a flurry of mails on the topic of, how do we say we spend all the money on bandwidth and servers?
Is this people taking it as a given that this is something (the pledge bank) that the Foundation should do?
I'm asking this because Thomas is the only one who has said he thinks this is a good/viable idea.
Brian McNeil
hi brian,
many thanks! every idea is worth writing down, could you put it on the wiki where you already put the payment options? maybe we should make also an overview page of the "brainstorm results", what do you think?
rupert. --------------- http://members.wikimedia.ch/did you know you can deduce your donations from tax? http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations.
newsie.org> wrote:
I'm curious, the "pledge bank" idea has provoked a flurry of mails on the topic of, how do we say we spend all the money on bandwidth and servers?
Is this people taking it as a given that this is something (the pledge bank) that the Foundation should do?
I'm asking this because Thomas is the only one who has said he thinks this is a good/viable idea.
Brian McNeil
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http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Payment_methods
Added the pledge bank, edit away! And comment on the talk.
I've already summarised some of the issues with things like Direct Debit (privacy/data protection issues).
For the pledge bank, I'd like to be quite ambitious. Start that up about a month after the fundraiser with a trial notified about in the Signpost and other community newsletters. Get people designing the buttons and certificates. Goal: $1 million pledged before the next fundraiser, with a 80% conversion rate to actual donations.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of THURNER rupert Sent: 25 November 2007 01:27 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Pledge bank
hi brian,
many thanks! every idea is worth writing down, could you put it on the wiki where you already put the payment options? maybe we should make also an overview page of the "brainstorm results", what do you think?
rupert. --------------- http://members.wikimedia.ch/did you know you can deduce your donations from tax? http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Deductibility_of_donations.
newsie.org> wrote:
I'm curious, the "pledge bank" idea has provoked a flurry of mails on the topic of, how do we say we spend all the money on bandwidth and servers?
Is this people taking it as a given that this is something (the pledge
bank)
that the Foundation should do?
I'm asking this because Thomas is the only one who has said he thinks this is a good/viable idea.
Brian McNeil
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It's not general admin, it's our core competency: Keeping the servers up and running.
It's still general admin. Just because general admin is the most important thing the WMF does doesn't stop it being general admin and doesn't it any more interesting. There is a big difference between important and interesting.
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