[Foundation-l] Isn't it getting to be time...

[Michael Davis]

Jeremy Tobacman wrote:
> Fundraising stats and figures are still up from the previous drives:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia/Fundraising
> Can anyone lend me a hand with the formatting of the raw data?  If so, I can
> extend the figures to cover the last few months and provide frequent updates
> during any new drives.
>
> On 5/25/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I agree with Ant (if that is what she meant) that the "personal appeal"
>> should probably show up for anonymous users on all wikis. It would be even
>> nicer if that message would change regularly.
>>
>>     
>
> These sound like good ideas.  To me they also suggest a question:
> How can we figure out what fundraising tactics are actually the most
> effective?
> I propose that we run some "randomized evaluations," eg, by randomly varying
> the fundraising appeal that gets served to some visitors to the site.  The
> randomization could be done based on the time of the page request, the IP,
> or something else.  Then we could compare the contributions made by people
> who received different appeals, and subsequently focus on the ones that
> worked best.
>
> Jeremy
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>   
That's a great suggestion and long overdue.  We should organize our 
public fundraising approaches  more professionally and really study what 
is and isn't effective.  If we can improve the effectiveness, we can 
have shorter or less frequent fundraisers. Currently our non-fundraiser 
donation rate is close to our operating expense thus allowing us to 
spread out our fundraisers. It's still not enough to sustain the 
operation when we consider our capital expenditures.

Michael