Hey Everyone,

Since the pandemic started the fundraising team has been working flat out to ensure the Wikimedia movement has the financial resources to continue with its work. We planned one of the busiest summers we had ever faced and that put the movement in a good place. Even with that work, the end of year fundraising in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the USA and the United Kingdom remains critically important. Approximately half of the annual funds for the Wikimedia movement are raised in the final quarter of the year.

Due to the pandemic and its impacts on people's lives, our team's capacity was also reduced and so we factored in more time into our work. This year we kicked off our E-mail fundraising programme in these countries earlier in September. This programme focuses on asking previous donors to reaffirm their support to Wikimedia and our English campaign will continue steadily through the rest of this calendar year.

The key to growing our donor base is our fundraising banner campaigns but at the same time we try to keep the disruption these campaigns cause to a minimum. We don’t fundraise year round and generally we are fundraising for around one month in any country. As for other campaigns, we test in advance to stress test our systems, explore new ideas, and improve workflows etc. all in time for the busiest period of the year. This year we will be looking to begin the main campaign Nov30/Dec1 Tuesday, December 1. We will look to fundraise through the month of December.

Our content evolves every year and all the feedback we get from community members, donors and social media feeds directly into our testing programme. We’ll also be proactively following up with ways for community members to propose test ideas for our messaging.

There are a number of ways you can report issues. For the non-urgent feedback, you can email directly to seddon {{at}} wikimedia.org. If you prefer real time you’ll find me on #wikipedia-en on IRC, the Wikimedia General Chat on telegram and in the English Discord server.

If you see any technical issues with the banners or payments systems please do report it on phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?template=118862

If you see a donor on a talk page, OTRS, or social media with questions about donating or having difficulties in the donation process, please refer them to: donate {{at}} wikimedia.org.

Here is also the fundraising IRC channel where you can raise urgent technical issues: #wikimedia-fundraising ( http://webchat.freenode.net?channels=%23wikimedia-fundraising&uio=d4)

From myself and on behalf of my colleagues, can I thank everyone for the

patience and support fundraising is given from across the movement both throughout the year and especially over the coming weeks.