Hey Everyone!

My name is Seddon, I’ve been a Wikipedian since 2006, was heavily involved in my local affiliate in the UK for a number of years and since 2016 I’ve supported the Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team in their community outreach particularly around our online fundraising campaigns.

As many of you know our grant programmes, servers and websites are supported mainly through online fundraising. This takes the form of web banners on our projects on both mobile and desktop devices. We produce an annual report of our fundraising activities that might be useful to read to get a background of the history of this type of fundraising. [1] [2]

It’s been a number of years since we last fundraised in India and over the next 12 months we’ve set ourselves a goal to return to India.

The first step in this process will be to test out our payment systems. Fundraising in a new country comes with a significant amount of technical work. Through the end of July we’ll running some pre-existing banners to test out our infrastructure. These tests will generally run for a couple of hours at a time.

Our main campaign will be run in 2020. Between now and then we will be looking to work with community members, affiliates, CIS-A2K, research partners and other local experts from across India to build our first campaign and develop the messaging together.

Throughout this period we’ll be looking for suggestions about ideas, themes and values that we should convey in our fundraising appeals. Input from people across the Indian communities is going to be vital to make our campaign successful.

Personally I’m really quite excited to get to know the communities in India and I through this work, I’m really looking forward to getting to know all of you and your work.

Thank you all in advance!

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Seddon

Community and Audience Engagement Associate
Advancement, Wikimedia Foundation

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2017-18_Report
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2016-17_Report