[Wikimedia-l] Fundraising updates?

Sat Dec 15 11:03:39 UTC 2012

Zack, Thanks for the detailed email. It was very interesting email and
I appreciate that you took the time to write it. Good work!

I still hope to see information from Chapters about the amount collected
till now, to help us see the full picture of the fundraising this year.

Itzik

On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Zack Exley <zexley at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi Itzik -
>
> I can give a short update -- and there will be more details in the
> fundraising report after the campaign.
>
> The banners from last year with the faces of editors, staff or Jimmy and
> "Please read a personal appeal from..." stopped working between last year
> and this year. We tried very hard to figure out why, but I still can't say
> exactly why. It could be a mix of underlying issues that are pulling down
> performance of any kind of banner and the fact that everyone on the
> internet knows exactly what's in that "personal appeal" now and are no
> longer curious enough to click.
>
> What saved us was taking text from the personal appeals and putting it into
> the banner itself. These banners did very well. These new message-driven
> banners are what made us split the campaign in two -- because we knew we
> were going to develop a lot of new messages and not have time to translate
> them well. The campaign that started on the 27th of November ran only in
> five countries: Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United
> States.
>
> At first, we had a short version of the new banner:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1123_Smallinfo_fix
>
> We could have run that for 46 days (the length of last year's campaign) and
> probably made our goal. But it performed better the more information we put
> into it. Through a series of tests we became confident that, while greater
> banner height improved performance, that wasn't as big a factor as the
> additional information we put into the banner. We tested many new versions
> of messages in the banners and found many improvements. It looked like we
> might be able to have a 25 day-long fundraiser.
>
> We launched on the 27th. A few days into the campaign, we were still
> paranoid about the goal. We were afraid that maybe the new banners would
> burn out faster than the old ones did. Maybe they were good at getting
> donations faster, but maybe we were not increasing the overall pool of
> donors. We were constantly testing to boost performance. Out of curiosity,
> we tested making the banners stick to the top of the screen while the page
> scrolled. We knew that would be a dramatic step in a more annoying
> direction, but like I said, we were still worried about the goal and just
> wanted to know what our options were. The "sticky" banners did about 30%
> better for donations. So we decided to keep them and see if we could get
> the campaign done with in a very short time.
>
> After 8 days of having the banners up, we were able take banners down and
> only display them to people who had not seen them before (or rather,
> browsers and computers that had not seen them before). We've never been
> able to do this before and only had this feature fully developed several
> days into the campaign. Since we took banners down for everyone, we've
> mostly been displaying them only 1 or 2 times to people who've never seen
> them. Though yesterday we pushed that up to 10 because we're hoping to
> reach our US$25 million goal in the next few days.
>
> We also made the banners stop sticking after the first 8 days, and
> hopefully we'll never feel we have to use sticky banners again. In total,
> we had sticky banners up for 4 or 5 days.
>
> We hope that next week we'll be able to start a sort of "Thank you
> campaign." We will feature a thank you message, a video of Wikimedia
> editors talking about their experience, interviews and written messages
> from editors collected at Wikimania, and an invitation to all our readers
> to become editors. The purpose of this campaign is mainly to raise
> awareness among readers about how Wikimedia projects work and who is behind
> them. The purpose is also to take time to explicitly thank donors for
> helping us reach our goal so quickly this year. Thanking is a very
> important part of fundraising -- but we've always been so eager to take
> down banners that we've never taken enough time to thank donors in the
> past. This year we feel its ok since almost no one saw banners for more
> than 8 days.
>
> I know there will probably be a lot of detailed questions about income from
> different countries, comparisons to last year, to the chapters, etc... We
> can't answer those now because we're too busy trying to wrap up the
> campaign -- and also because a lot of transactions take time to settle.
> Checks flow in slowly. And accurate comparisons take time to prepare. We
> don't have truly accurate numbers until later in January.
>
> But the basic result we have is that all 5 countries we ran banners saw a
> huge increase in "donations per banner impression" from last year. I can
> also say that in our Nov 15th 24-hour "dress rehearsal" in which we ran an
> earlier version of the new banners (that didn't perform near as well as the
> one we eventually discovered) we also saw a very big increase in almost
> every country in the world. The exceptions were countries where we made
> some error (such as not turning banners on for half the day). Even in a
> country like Greece, where the economy is about as bad as it can get, we
> saw something like a 300% increase compared the the equivalent first day of
> the campaign last year. Therefore, we think we'll be able to keep our
> Spring campaign very low-impact.
>
> I hope this satisfies some of the curiosity about the campaign. Please ask
> questions, but please be understanding if we can't answer detailed
> questions while we're busy still running the campaign.
>
> Zack
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Itzik Edri <itzik at infra.co.il> wrote:
>
> > Indeed, a good start, that I already checked.
> >
> > The statistics shows only WMF data. Last year we had google docs file
> that
> > the chapters shared their numbers every day also.
> >
> > And there is no indication to which banners running and their
> performance,
> > things that I'll like to see.
> >
> > The fundraising team did some interesting changes this year, which will
> > be interesting to know their performances.
> >
> > Itzik.
> >
> > 2012/12/13 Till Mletzko <till.mletzko at wikimedia.de>
> >
> > > and: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012
> > >
> > > Till
> > >
> > >
> > > Am 13.12.2012 15:12, schrieb Theo10011:
> > > > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Itzik Edri <itzik at infra.co.il>
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> Hi,
> > > >>
> > > >> Could we get some updates (or that I missed them?) about how the
> > > >> fundraising goes? WMF and Chapters will be great. Since we only
> focus
> > on
> > > >> few countries this year, the discussions regarding it is very low,
> but
> > > it
> > > >> still very interesting to know how much we collect and how the
> banners
> > > >> works (and which one of them)
> > > >>
> > > > http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics  -
> > is a
> > > > good start.
> > > >
> > > > -Theo
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> > >
> > > --
> > > Mit freundlichen Grüßen
> > >
> > > Till Mletzko
> > > Fundraiser
> > > -------------------------------------
> > > Wikimedia Fördergesellschaft
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> > >
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>
>
> --
> Zack Exley
> Chief Revenue Officer
> Wikimedia Foundation
> 415 506 9225
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