Daniel Mayer wrote:

I plan to be the coordinator for our Q1 2005 fund drive sometime in mid January to early February. The timing will likely coincide with Wikipedia Day and perhaps the 500,000th English Wikipedia article and maybe some other milestones along with distribution of the newsletter. I never considered having a fund drive right before/during the winter holidays...

For consideration in future years, many nonprofit groups start donation drives around October/November, in the hopes of convincing people to make an end-of-year donation. Since US taxes are done by calendar year, there are a certain number of people who decide on their donations near the end of the year---donations in December still count as deductions on that year's taxes, but are sufficiently late in the year so the people know their income/tax situation as much as possible and can decide how much they want to give for the year.

(It'd be interesting if there were any statistics on how successful such drives are, of course.)

For future years, more product-oriented things might work too. A nicely-bound print version of Wikipedia (or some subset thereof) could make a good Christmas present.

-Mark