[Foundation-l] Fundraising totals as of Oct 7, 2007 @ 5:00 PM (EST)

[Andrew Gray]

On 09/11/2007, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> For a bit of perspective, those numbers still aren't great.
>
> Overall traffic is up 40% since the 2006 fund drive, but after a similar
> number of days, the 2006 fundraiser had slightly more donors[1] and about
> $350,000 more in donations.
>
> If I understand correctly, much of the extra income was from donation
> matching (including $286,000 from one source), while thus far we don't seem
> to have had any donor matching efforts.

Indeed. Once we factor out donation matching, what's the donation disjoint like?

(ie, what is the year-on-year difference in money actually given by
our normal donors)

>  Even given that, it is also
> disappointing to see that the number of individual donations hasn't grown in
> response to growth in traffic to Wikimedia sites.

Are donors homogenously distributed among the population? It strikes
me as plausible that the "early adopter" population is more likely to
donate than the residue - in other words, we'd get diminishing returns
from here on in.

> [1] I'm excluding the 900 donations of 1 penny.  It appears that 1 or more
> people are systematically donating pennies to pump the donor counter.  A
> similar trend was not present in 2006.

There were a noticeable number of $0.01 (or 1 yen or whatever)
donations in the previous fundraiser - I don't have the comparative
figures to hand, but anecdotally it seems about comparable.

I also wouldn't be so confident it's solely to pump the donor banner.
Many people have spotted the donation comments and are under the
impression these are live (or randomly selected from a pool), so will
make multiple donations to try and get a comment up there. (Again,
surmisal, but I've seen pretty plausible indicators for it)

As Danny mentions below, though, it's probably a seperate reason, not
linked to our banner.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk