[Wikimedia-l] deliberately lowered fundraising growth rate (was: Fundraising updates?)

[James Salsman]

Matt,

I do not share your perspective, and I want you to understand why.

> as a member of the fundraising technology team - that I was shocked,
> utterly amazed, and astounded at how successful this years fundraiser was.

You met a goal based on a growth rate which had been lowered once in
July after a lengthy non-quantitative repoort from your boss about the
difficulties you faced which was proven in error time and time again
in testing throughout the year, and again after the leadership
abandoned much of the Strategic Plan a few months ago. I am only
shocked by the brazenness of this apologism for exceeding
twice-lowered expectations.

> One -- banner impressions were down! Yes the report card says page views
> went up; but did you know that when looking at only at the number of HTML
> pages served to the top five deskop browsers that they actually went down a
> couple percent from the same time last year? See [1] but you'll have to do
> the maths yourself....

Your link to http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htmnormalized
does not work, but I assume you meant to write
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportRequests.htm
normalized by http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm

Are you trying to imply that the 21 billion pageviews last month shown
on the reportcard, up from 16 billion last December, were the result
of so many more mobile requests that banner impressions were down?
Frankly, that is absurd because
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportDevices.htm
shows 32 billion requests from mobile devices which are clearly not
included in the 21 billion on the reportcard graph.

> There's a reason the test results page [2] is titled "We need a breakthrough"

I note with no amusement whatsoever that
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Breakthrough&diff=3741759&oldid=3741756
was renamed on May 12, a day after it already showed showed the result
of tests which exceeded the performance of the best banners from last
year:

"we can feature Jimmy, editors, staff, donors and others and make as
much as with our standard money-maker, the Jimmy appeal" -- 11 May
2012

This attempt to try to lower expectations is transparent, and not in a good way.

> Three -- let's take a look at the numbers ceteris paribus. I'm going to
> assume that fundraising numbers taken straight from [3] can be modeled as
> an exponential....

I am not interested in modeling the fact that fundraising was
discontinued just over a week after it was seen to far exceed the
Chief Revenue Officer's projections.

> it's laudable the board looked at what they a considered reasonable
> sustainable growth curve and then held themselves too it.

What they considered, or what they were told based on a non-quantitate
projection?

> it seems that yes people are happy with the current campaign.

I most certainly am not. I see no evidence other than to conclude that
if the Board declines to hold the leadership accountable for this,
then they need to be replaced by the community.

Sincerely,
James Salsman