[Foundation-l] Regarding the Fundraising Banner

[Erik Moeller]

2008/11/5 Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv at gmail.com>:
> Several things why banner should not be obtrusive:
> 1) Due to some differences in different cultures some people would
> decide never to visit Wikipedia rather than to donate :(
>
> 2) The previous year banner looked like we asked people to donate us,
> now we are *begging* them to donate us. The difference between asking
> and begging is that begging is considered to be a very bad form. Read your
> message. The first thought that people have when they see that banner is
> "Oh no, they are also affected by financial crysis". Do we really want
> to let people
> think that? (see point one to answer this question)

Our goal is to actually track how these different messages perform. If
we find that making the messages smaller does not significantly affect
donations, we'll make them smaller. If we find that changing the tone
increases donations, we'll change the tone. We feel that the current
full-size appeal is an acceptable size for a once a year campaign,
especially once logged in users can fully collapse it easily. But
there's no reason to maintain this size if reducing it results in
equal or greater impact.

But, we don't want to make any assumptions.Yes, it is meant to attract
attention and give exposure to the fact that we're a charity which
relies on people's donations, something most people don't even know
about us. Attracting sufficient attention and giving sufficient
exposure to this messaging is a precondition to keeping the site
operational and taking our mission forward, and core to how Wikipedia
is currently sustained.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate