--- Krzysztof Kowalczyk kkowalczyk@gmail.com wrote:
I was just looking on Foundation's fund-rising page and have two comments.
- I think that "Merchandise" and "Donations" should be separated,
similar to what http://www.mozilla.org/ does. I believe more people would visit "Merchandise" or "WikiPedia merchandise" resulting in more sales => more funding. I believe that because in people's minds "donating" and "buying cool stuff" (even if it ultimately leads to funding a good cause) is strongly separated.
As a matter of fact I also like the way the Mozilla people have their website organized in that regard. However we only currently have one page and that is in pure HTML which is hard to maintain. The WMF website under development will have more than one page for fund raising.
But don't expect a Wikimedia store anytime soon - selling merchandise is fairly low on my list of priorities. We might eventually partner with ThinkGeek, MandrakeSoft, or even Mozilla to sell Wikimedia/Wikipedia merchandise.
In more specific terms, things that could be done:
- a link to "Merchandise" on main wikipedia.org page, in the nav
section, next to "Donations" link
There are already too many links and the amount of money we get per order is paltry. Thus a direct link is not warrented.
In general I think that foundation should study what Mozilla project does for fundraising as they are not larger/more visible project but according to http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110721 they do much better at getting funding via. t-shirt sales ($15,000.00 for mozilla vs. $460.90 for wikipedia).
Is that gross or net for Mozilla? How does the donation/t-shirt bundle come into play? Our figure is net. Either way I plan to study many different non-profit's websites to see what they do. I'm particularly interested in how different NPR/PBS affiliates do this type of thing as well as free software projects/distributions.
Things that I think mozilla.org does better:
- much nicer web design. No offense, but
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising is bad, both functionally (it's hard to read, the copy isn't that great) and visually (compare to http://www.mozillastore.com/products/clothing)
It is hard to read at low resolution and the copy could use some condensing, yes. But comparing it to Mozilla's clothing sales page is not valid or fair.
- selling t-shirts on open-source conventions (linuxcon/oscon/devday)
which is what http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110721 implies that mozilla foundation is doing (I don't really know, I haven't been there)
Again the focus on t-shirts is misplaced. We've had our CafePress shop linked very prominently for some time now and have only seen a small trickle of money come in from that. At the same time we have taken in close to a $100,000 from donations.
Also, I think that Mozilla's "$50 donation t-shirt" (http://www.mozillastore.com/products/donations/50shirt) is a good idea. It could even had a text that says that e.g. "I donated to WikiPedia", "I make Free Encyclopedia possible", "I fund Free Encyclopedia" - something along those lines.
In the future perhaps. Right now that is not practical.
-- Daniel Mayer
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