*Apologies for cross posting*

Hi everyone -

We are quickly approaching the launch of the 2011 Wikimedia annual fundraiser. These past few months have been critical to ramp up our operation in preparation of the year-end campaign.

Here is where we are at now: Starting Monday November 7, we would like to launch the fundraiser to only logged-in users. Last year, we took down banners for logged in users about a month into the fundraiser. This year, we want to take the banners down even earlier for logged in users and starting next week will allow us to do that.

We are asking every community member who is planning to donate, to make their donation in this first week to help us test our donation forms in all different countries and languages. We have put a lot of effort into localizing our messages and forms. If you see any errors or ways we can improve the setup in your country or language, please get in touch with us on the the fundraising meta talk page [1] in the next week so we can make these improvements before we put up banners for all users on Monday, November 14.

We will be sending out notices about the logged-in launch/test to mailing lists and village pumps this week. Please help us spread the word!

Thanks for helping us get off to a strong start.

From The Fundraising Team

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2011 **