[Foundation-l] Update on the fundraiser

[Philippe Beaudette]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to just do a quick update to this list about the status of  
the Fundraiser.

As you know, we committed to making this a highly collaborative  
process, and I'm very pleased with how that's working out so far.  We  
have many banner suggestions from the community (you can view them all  
at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Messages ) and  
members of the community are actively engaged in designing our social  
media strategy.  Of course, the Foundation will provide support to  
those community members.

We have begun and continue a process of outreach to the various wikis  
in our projects: we have a dedicated outreach team that's working to  
contact every wiki and identify people who are willing to lead the  
discussions on their home wiki, or engage in the discussion on meta.

I want to clarify a couple of things:  first, messaging will almost  
definitely be project specific.  That is, without a clear and  
compelling reason, when reading the banner suggestions, you should  
assume that "Meta" or "Wikipedia" would be replaced with the name of  
the project you're viewing the banner on.  Obviously, some banners are  
project specific, and those will run ONLY on the appropriate project.   
(Wikipedia would not get a message targeted at Wiktionary, for  
instance, and vice versa, but they would both get messages that were  
tailored for the global projects).  Second, when we engage in  
translating the messages that will be used, we will strongly encourage  
the communities to not just translate but to actually localize.  If  
the slogan doesn't make sense in Swahili, for instance, we'll ask the  
translators to help us work with it until it does.

One of my colleagues, Sage Ross, a longtime wikimedian, submitted a  
theme that I love:  "Edit this fundraiser."  That's really what we're  
shooting for: a fundraiser that we all jointly collaborate to create.   
We'll have expert support and the group of fundraising professionals  
that I work with at the Foundation are top notch, but it's very  
important that there be community engagement.  So, please, edit the  
fundraiser.  Suggest banner ideas, and just as importantly, join in  
the debate about the ones that are suggested!

As you probably know, we're doing banner testing on Thursday  
afternoons (Pacific time).  You may not know that we're posting the  
statistics as quickly as possible, so that the community can help us  
to evaluate effectiveness.  All the stats reports are indexed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing/Stats 
  .  The team at the Foundation is working very hard to ensure that we  
all have the same information upon which to judge the success and  
failure of the banners.

We're engaging in a redesign of the donation process as well, which  
will simplify the process, we hope.  The technical testing for that is  
beginning now.  In addition, we're testing (hopefully this week) the  
infrastructure for targeting banners at specific geographic locations,  
which will allow us a great deal more precision in our targeting of  
messages.

On the whole, although there's a ton of work yet to be done, I'm  
optimistic about our progress so far.

What would make it better?

If you join in the discussion.

Thanks,
Philippe
____________________
Philippe Beaudette	
Head of Reader Relations
Wikimedia Foundation

philippe at wikimedia.org

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