Hoi, I think the foundation did great with the last fundraiser. When we *need *something like 6 million dollar we should ask for it and it is legitimate to ask for it. It is really sad that people do not realise how much our aims suffer from a lack of investment. We need to do better, we can do better and it *does *take money to do this. When you have proposals to make for a next fundraiser, make them. If your ideas have merit, I am sure they will be taken up. If these ideas work out and provide us with sufficient funding to not need what you call a "begaton", fine. However, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We need to be funded for our activities and if this requires a fundraiser, we will have one. Thanks, GerardM 2009/1/7 White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com>

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:11 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: and you know this because...? -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

I think you guys did a great job, all in all. We can't and shouldn't expect it to be perfect, and obviously you can't please everyone. I'm happy to say that the disgruntlement I described in my "strong negative reaction" thread at the beginning of the fundraiser did not prevent a very successful outcome for the drive. It really shows the value of a professional staff, a value that we've seen in a number of areas around Wikimedia. There will always be people against asking for money, against banners, etc. But they don't come with ideas on what to replace money with... (perhaps WMF can get into providing natural gas to EU countries?), so in the mean time money it is! Personally I appreciate that the foundation is working to make fundraising a year round project, particularly with respect to large donations from individuals and other foundations. I wonder if we can't work more closely with other, more established charitable foundations though. If we connected our fundraising drive to the fundraising of another charity, particularly one that is very well known (like the B&M Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Red Cross, etc.), wouldn't that make our drive more high profile in the press and the donor world? Right now we get a lot of online buzz, but it doesn't seem to translate into wider coverage. Working with them would also much more clearly establish our charitable credentials, which directly targets the major perception gap in the world about Wikimedia. We could pair our whole drive with the drive of another major organization, or parcel out days or weeks separately (a week where our drive is "In cooperation with the American Red Cross, with donations split between these two very valuable organizations" etc.). I don't know if we would get more from the dual appeal than we lose by splitting donations, but we could always have separate "Click here to donate to Wikimedia" and "Click here to donate to the Red Cross." Something to perhaps consider, anyway. Nathan

(Sorry for not threading my replies). I realise (not being completely dense) that some of these large organizations don't solicit donations, but they might be willing to co-brand as a sort of "in-kind" donation to the WMF. My intent was more to name well known organizations to illustrate the point than to suggest specific candidates. As for siphoning off money - certainly most large organizations that survive on donations (to name better ones, the Red Cross, United Way, Salvation Army, UNICEF, American Cancer Society, World Wildlife Fund, etc. and smaller operations like LiveStrong, Susan G. Komen, etc. ) don't have the same online penetration that we have. They do, however, have a far more sophisticated offline solicitation system and cultural penetration. What they lack, we've got - what we lack, they've got. Sounds like a recipe for a beneficial partnership. If one group were to include us in their mailing and other solicitation work for a period of time, for instance, in exchange for participation in our fundraising drive... it might afford both organizations access to groups of people they otherwise might not reach. It would also, as I mentioned, provide the very valuable service of reinforcing with the public that the Wikimedia Foundation is charitable organization that depends on donations for all of its operations. That fact is implied in the very nature of a fundraising drive, but we saw from Jimmy's note that having a high profile advocate, a personal appeal and a clear expression of what Wikimedia is about really encourages people to donate. Nathan

Sorry Geni but you are totally wrong. Each year the Foundation asks for more money than the year before, and each year the citizens of the world give it. I challenge you to find 1% as many negative blog posts regarding the fundraiser as there are positive comments left by donors. On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:52 AM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- You have successfully failed!

I think your point was clear, but maybe not. Please restate it for me more clearly. Because I run daily searches of blogs for the term wikipedia. Because complaints have turned up all over the place on wikipedia. Because or editors who also have to read the thing have gone so far as to have a gadget to get rid of it. Because adblock which targets banner ads among other things has 10,850,228 dowloads.

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote: Apart from that interesting debate between you and geni, I had the personal impression that this year's fundraising drive created a bit more negative responses for example in the OTRS (both relative and absolute) than last year's. I don't have numbers to prove it, so it remains an anecdote. Mathias

Not really, if you give your eyes to blogosphere global and hence multingual, including mine. I hope some would go through mine to the fundraising page, and some of trackbacks to my entry were clearly positive ("I've donated them, you can do too") too. It is still anectodal, but I think it good to show your commitment to the project on your blog, not only through your editing. A blog entry which reads "I love Wikipedia because xxx and will appreciate every support, specially financial one" has worked well, at least in Japanophone blogosphere. On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote: -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

2009/1/7 Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com>om>: Perhaps so - an absolute increase of scrutiny is certainly to be expected as the overall number of donations nearly tripled, i.e. we have asked for, and received, a lot more attention than ever before. The upside and downside of the growing blogosphere with millions of micromedia is the same: There's a lot more voices and opinions. Rumors spread much more quickly, and false claims can be repeated (and monetized) much more easily than ever before. So can important statements of fact. If we empower our volunteers through a high degree of operational transparency, facts should prevail. That principle has informed many decisions we've made this year: hence the detailed Q&As on the budget and the financial statements, the detailed Annual Report, etc. Overall we're very happy with these materials, and in my opinion they represent the highest degree of operational transparency that we've ever had. In some areas, we've found our materials to be worthy of improvement, and I think it'll become clearer what those areas are as we further analyze the fundraiser as a whole. For example, while we've tried to explain that expense categories in the pie charts represent entire departmental budgets rather than individual salaries, they were still often misunderstood or misconstrued to be the latter. Being more specific and providing further data on how money is spent in each category should help both readers and volunteers who want to correct misunderstandings. The flip side of the coin is communicating impact through hard data and personal stories. That, too, is an area in which we can improve, especially if we continue to grow operationally. How many more people edit due to usability improvements? What, if any, was the positive impact of the FlaggedRevs extension? Has site responsiveness and uptime increased? How many more videos have been uploaded thanks to new capacity? How many books have been printed via PediaPress? How many people have attended Wikipedia workshops around the world? How many static copies of Wikipedia are circulating as DVDs, on laptops, etc.? And how are people's lives transformed through our work? As a 23-people organization, it's clear that our communication efforts need to culminate in volunteer-driven efforts of both a proactive and reactive nature. That's already the case to a great degree (thanks to volunteers like yourself), and I hope that we will continue to improve in that regard. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

2009/1/7 Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)gmail.com>om>: A lot of that happened through donate(a)wikipedia.org this year, which is at the footer of every page in the new fundraising module, but I agree that a re-introducing a public forum of some sort would be a good idea. I think wiki pages are a bit user-unfriendly for people with no wiki experience. Perhaps a use case for LiquidThreads. ;-) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

on 1/8/09 4:30 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge(a)telus.net wrote: And that chasm is growing wider in more ways than just numbers, Ray. Marc Riddell

on 1/8/09 4:30 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge(a)telus.net wrote: The Foundation - and those who represent it - seem to have forgotten that people are at the heart of what they are there to do. And, without the heart, it cannot live. Marc Riddell

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com> wrote: My anecdotal opinion is exactly the opposite. My impression, based mostly on comments left at either enwiki, meta, or the public mailing lists, is that this years' drive was substantially less negatively recieved than last years. That impression may be skewed toward community member (rather than reader) reactions based on my source material. While anecdotal, I'd suggest several factors that would favor a less negative reaction to this drive: Last year was the very first year with a boxy banner (rather than a one or two line text announcement). The messaging in the 2007 drive was poor (in my opinion). The drive highlighted things like bringing information to kids in Africa, and said little about how donations improved the online encyclopedia. I can recall numerous examples of people saying they supported Wikipedia but didn't want to see money spent towards those far flung third world projects when there was so much still to do with the website. I don't recall seeing any reaction like that towards the 2008 drive. Last year was the first time a drive had ever exceeded 40 days in length, and with it running to nearly 80 days it really seemed to drag on. This year was also well over 40 days, but I think the negative reaction this time was reduced by not having it be the first long drive. This year, from the beginning, the presentation generally seemed to be accepted as much more professional. In 2007 the drive started in a very ad hoc manner with an ugly pink box and scrolling marquee that many people hated (not to mention anecdotal reports that the javascript scrolling banner crashed some older browsers). Last year there were very active discussions, supported by some admins, for enwiki to outright block the banner due to how distasteful and unproffessional many found people it. I don't think the reaction to this year's drive ever rose to that level of vitriol. The only factors that really weighed against this year's drive seemed to be that the banner was too big and too bold in many people's opinion (myself included), and that it was hard to comletely banish. I'd renew my call for the height of the banner to be decreased 30% next year. However, my anecdotal opinion is that those factors didn't raise people's frustrations as much as in 2007. Since we now seem to have three different opinions on how this drive was recieved, I'd love to see if anyone can figure out a way to quantify the reaction more directly. Ultimately though, the one objective measure I can point to is money. If Alexa is to be believed, the traffic to Wikimedia sites year over year has decreased about 10% while the income raised from small donors more than doubled (despite harsher economic conditions and fewer days in this drive as well). So whatever the overall reaction, people were ultimately more willing to give us money this year than last year. At least at some level that suggests this year's drive was significantly better recieved than last years. -Robert Rohde

2009/1/7 Anders Wegge Keller <wegge(a)wegge.dk>dk>: This only works if you are seriously trying to suggest that there are people who feel that large banners add to the wikipedia experience. Most people come to wikipedia to read articles. Generally having font-size: 33 banners between the top of the page and the article is not a good way to facilitate this. Now we can agree that fundraising banners that size are apparently effective which is good but thankyou banners that size less so. If a thank you is required one the size of the collapsed banner would appear to suffice. -- geni

2009/1/7 Anders Wegge Keller <wegge(a)wegge.dk>dk>: You miss the point. The banners are not fundraising any more (unless you collapse them) Any evidence for those claims? And how about thanking him by not degrading his wikipedia experience? -- geni

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Anders Wegge Keller <wegge(a)wegge.dk> wrote: Or in the more emphasized way, I from Japan say. In some cultures people think of appreciation expression quite seriously. Lack or shortage of that may be taken as a sign of rudeness and would cause a huge negative reactions. -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD