Hi everyone,

I wanted to just do a quick update to this list about the status of the Fundraiser.

As you know, we committed to making this a highly collaborative process, and I'm very pleased with how that's working out so far. We have many banner suggestions from the community (you can view them all at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Messages ) and members of the community are actively engaged in designing our social media strategy. Of course, the Foundation will provide support to those community members.

We have begun and continue a process of outreach to the various wikis in our projects: we have a dedicated outreach team that's working to contact every wiki and identify people who are willing to lead the discussions on their home wiki, or engage in the discussion on meta.

I want to clarify a couple of things: first, messaging will almost definitely be project specific. That is, without a clear and compelling reason, when reading the banner suggestions, you should assume that "Meta" or "Wikipedia" would be replaced with the name of the project you're viewing the banner on. Obviously, some banners are project specific, and those will run ONLY on the appropriate project. (Wikipedia would not get a message targeted at Wiktionary, for instance, and vice versa, but they would both get messages that were tailored for the global projects). Second, when we engage in translating the messages that will be used, we will strongly encourage the communities to not just translate but to actually localize. If the slogan doesn't make sense in Swahili, for instance, we'll ask the translators to help us work with it until it does.

One of my colleagues, Sage Ross, a longtime wikimedian, submitted a theme that I love: "Edit this fundraiser." That's really what we're shooting for: a fundraiser that we all jointly collaborate to create. We'll have expert support and the group of fundraising professionals that I work with at the Foundation are top notch, but it's very important that there be community engagement. So, please, edit the fundraiser. Suggest banner ideas, and just as importantly, join in the debate about the ones that are suggested!

As you probably know, we're doing banner testing on Thursday afternoons (Pacific time). You may not know that we're posting the statistics as quickly as possible, so that the community can help us to evaluate effectiveness. All the stats reports are indexed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing/Stats . The team at the Foundation is working very hard to ensure that we all have the same information upon which to judge the success and failure of the banners.

We're engaging in a redesign of the donation process as well, which will simplify the process, we hope. The technical testing for that is beginning now. In addition, we're testing (hopefully this week) the infrastructure for targeting banners at specific geographic locations, which will allow us a great deal more precision in our targeting of messages.

On the whole, although there's a ton of work yet to be done, I'm optimistic about our progress so far.

What would make it better?

If you join in the discussion.

Thanks, Philippe ____________________ Philippe Beaudette Head of Reader Relations Wikimedia Foundation

philippe@wikimedia.org

Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!

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