Hello all,

I just want to send a note to celebrate the enormous success of the 2011 fundraiser. It used to be the case that I was pretty involved in the annual campaign. For the last two fundraiser, Zack Exley's been running the show, and I'm enormously impressed by and proud of what he and his team have been able to accomplish.

When we prepared the budget for 2011-12, I worried that we'd need to cross new lines in order to generate that much revenue. The 2010 campaign already felt like we were hitting the ceiling of how much can be raised from a large number of individual donations. Last year, we were showing Jimmy's face and appeals in many different variations through much of the fundraiser. We had tried some pretty aggressive banners, like these ones:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&... http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&...

Jimmy certainly didn't crave this level of attention, but he was a good sport and gave his approval. The campaign was tremendously successful. But after it was over, we weren't just worried that our readers might be feeling "Jimmy fatigue", we were all feeling it, including, I'm sure, Jimmy himself. But it simply remains true that people strongly identify with him, and that his appeals tend to motivate people to give more clearly than anything else.

So it was with some anxiety that we approached the 2011 campaign. Zack isn't the kind of person who makes a grand master plan and then sticks to it, so until it played out, I really didn't know what the 2011 campaign would look like. Instead of dreaming up plans, though, Zack and team had spent the months leading up to the fundraiser A/B testing and experimenting with ways to shorten the fundraiser and reduce our reliance on a single message/message-bearer. And so they learned tons of stuff: How long an appeal needed to be to work, what kind of photo/lighting/background was effective, what payment process would work, etc. And there was the usual usability testing, optimization of donations forms, etc.

This, by the way, told us that we didn't need graphically obnoxious banners -- the simple text on plain white with a photo worked just fine. (But it needed to be the right kind of photo, and yes, moving it to the left helped as well.)

And Zack hired storytellers, not an uncontroversial idea at the time, whose job it would be to go out there and collect the most compelling personal stories from people in our movement, wherever they may be and whatever role they may play. This allowed us to share lots of those stories, both through the testing and then through the actual fundraiser itself.

There's more -- prior to the campaign, the tech team worked enormously hard to integrate a new payment system, GlobalCollect. This would allow us to accept payments not just in all major currencies, but also through bank transfer, direct debit, and country-specific payment methods:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en

This, too, in combination with more effectively organized efforts by hundreds of volunteer translators, meant that banner impressions that were previously wasted (because people had no way to actually donate) were now going to turn into support for our work.

All the testing and infrastructure improvements meant that the first day of the fundraiser was our most effective day ever, by far. And it meant that we could raise our goal in less time than before. We've also turned off the banners for registered users in record time, and for the first time disabled banners for anyone making a donation. But most importantly it allowed us to share appeals like these:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/22/who-is-asking-you-to-donate-to-wikipedi...

These letters help people understand what Wikimedia is about through many different voices, metaphors and experiences. The story of an editor like Sengai Podhuvanar from India, or of a donor like Akshaya Iyengar, or Ward Cunningham's own story. The storytellers worked hard to capture the essence of these voices, so that they would be heard loud and clear.

The team could have chosen to use that time to show more effective Jimmy banners, or to pick one or two other banners and focus the entire campaign on them. Instead it sacrificed short term revenue impact for a more diverse and interesting campaign.

Years ago, we used to worry that people wouldn't/didn't understand that Wikimedia is a non-profit, that it's created by volunteers, that it's international/multilingual. Many misconceptions still exist, but for anyone paying attention, we've demolished them.

I know that everyone involved is enormously proud of working their butts off for Wikimedia and making this endeavor successful. I am, in turn, really pleased and grateful with where we are as we enter the new year. Not only do we have more resources at our disposal than ever to succeed -- we've firmly established that Wikimedia is a new kind of organization, a new kind of movement. With more than a million people joining this year to support us, we're continuing to make history together.

Thanks to everyone involved in making it happen (including, not to forget, the participating Wikimedia chapters), and to all who've supported Wikimedia this year. :-)

Happy 2012,

Erik