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

[Delphine Ménard]

On Nov 13, 2007 2:29 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Agreed.

If someone has the courage (and the possibility), I thought maybe
analysing the donors comments in the past few weeks to watch for
keywords and trends (in all languages) would give us an idea of *why*
people give and maybe help us recenter the message around those
themes, while keeping those other things we want to do as sub-themes
or longer term goals.

My wild guesses revolve around:
- Wikipedia saved my exams
- I learned so much thanks to Wikipedia
- Keep the knowledge free.

While I agree that we should avoid solidifying the message into "we
need money for the servers", we should, as you rightfully point out,
make sure that this is still a clear goal of ours. Let us face it,
none of these other things are going to happen if Wikipedia does not
stay online.



Delphine

-- 
~notafish

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*Chroniques du menteur*

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