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

[phoebe ayers]

On Nov 9, 2007 6:13 PM, THURNER rupert <rupert.thurner at wikimedia.ch> wrote:
> i think it is much too early to draw conclusions. but i agree that a clear
> reachable goal would be somehow nice on the display ... like the amount of
> money needed. red for running the servers, red-orange for the bandwith,
> yellow for international expansion, etc. the number of donors is not giving
> enough hint imo.
>
> rupert.

Yes, that would be nice. It'd also be nice to have some different
items that your money might buy ("if you and xx more people donate $xx
we can buy a new server") rotate on the donation page, so that
reluctant donors who might come back a few times can see different
possibilities. Especially for people who don't find the international
knowledge theme compelling, there might be a few more immediate items
listed (we need to pay our office rent, we need to pay our bandwidth
every month). There may be many casual readers who could care less
about the conference, say, but do want to see the site itself stay up.

Currently, three out of four things on the donation page are things we
would *like* to do (scholarships, academies, offline versions) and
while that's great, obscurity in representing need -- pretending that
the donor's money only goes to the fun projects and not in fact mostly
to paying salaries, getting bandwidth, buying office supplies and all
the other mundanities of running an organization -- is actually less
compelling to my mind than simply representing clearly, with examples,
what we need the money for and making a case that we will spend
people's money responsibly. For Wikipedia, everyone knows the content
is volunteer-generated, but I'm not sure the message that the
infrastructure needs cash to keep running is as clear.

-- phoebe