[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[Robert Rohde]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 11:50 AM, church.of.emacs.ml
<church.of.emacs.ml at googlemail.com> wrote:
<snip>

> Our banners are getting more annoying every year. We're being more
> aggressive. And we're putting words like "Urgent"[2] on the banners and
> suggest that we haven't paid our bills for 2010 yet[3] (which is at the
> very least misleading).

<snip>

This year and 2009 WMF did some direct comparison testing on the
effect of different messages.  As far as I know though, we have never
done direct comparison testing on banner size.  And yet, the 2010
banner was some 40% taller than used in 2008 or 2009.

It is plausible to me that making the banner larger gets more eyeballs
and hence more donations.  However, I doubt that 40% larger translates
to anywhere close to 40% more income.  Rather, I would suggest that
one is well into the realm of diminishing returns.  At the same time,
my personal opinion is that the large banner is much more annoying.
Personally, I'd support running a longer fundraising drive with
smaller banners rather than continuing with the current large size.
However, in order to really make those decisions one ought to know how
much the donation rate changes with banner size, and to my knowledge
no one in WMF has tested that.

It is easy for the new folks to not know that from Wikipedia's
inception until 2009, the most successful fundraiser campaign
(expressed as donations received per page view) was the 2005 Q4
"personal appeal" [1], which had a vertical footprint of only 93
pixels (vs. 163 in the typical 2010 banner and 115 in 2009).  Size
matters, but I suspect that message matters a lot more.

Before we rush down a path that could lead to popups and
blinkenlights, I'd like to suggest we seriously consider going back to
the 2009 banner size (or even smaller).  And by seriously consider, I
mean testing what the impact is likely to be, and have a conversation
about whether a somewhat longer campaign is a worthwhile trade-off for
less annoying banners.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sitenotice&direction=prev&oldid=33486512