Hi all,
There's a new Q1 fundraising update on meta
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising#2015-2016_Q1_Update> and
posted here as well.
The Wikimedia Foundation has just wrapped up the first quarter of the
2015-16 fiscal year. Over these past three months, the fundraising team has
been running ran campaigns in Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa,
Belgium and Luxembourg and prepared for the upcoming year-end English
fundraising campaign. The online fundraising team missed the $6 million
goal for the quarter due to postponing the Italy fundraiser to October to
support the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. We raised roughly $5.7 million
in the first quarter of the year and plan to make up for the loss in the
next quarter. The 2014-15 fiscal year fundraising report
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2014-2015_Fundraising_Report> was
also posted in this quarter. If you haven’t read it yet, please do check
out the report for a wealth of information on the last fiscal year.
The team has used this first quarter to test a wide variety of brand new
banners. From images, to banners highlighting photos from Commons, and
different messages, we’ve found a few new ways to share the fundraising
message with Wikipedia readers. With updated designs, we’ve ended the
quarter with a banner that performs roughly 20% better than the best-
performing banner from last quarter. Better performing banners are required
to raise a higher budget with declining traffic. We’ll continue testing new
banners into the next quarter and sharing highlights as we go.
The banner message has also been updated with suggestions from the
Wikimedia community. Thank you to everyone who has suggested improvements
so far! We have changed “We survive on donations averaging about $15” to
“We are sustained by donations averaging about $15.” We’ve also changed
“Please help us end the fundraiser and get back to improving Wikipedia” to
“Please help us end the fundraiser and improve Wikipedia.” These message
edits did not positively or negatively affect donations and were made in
response to community feedback. In the past, we have also relied on
community feedback to improve our campaigns. In the last year, community
feedback has led to improvements to the usability of the close X icon and a
new line to highlight the editing community, “Wikipedia is written by a
community of volunteers with a passion for sharing the world’s knowledge.”
All of these community suggestions remain in the banner. Another sentence
that was briefly tested on a small percentage of users about a year ago
that received negative community feedback was “If everyone reading this
gave $3, we could keep it online and ad-free another year.” We did not end
up using that sentence for the campaign and we commit to not using it in
any future campaign. In the next quarter, we are planning many more message
tests -- with both brand new ideas as well as smaller tweaks to the
existing text. If you have an idea to test, please share on the 2015-16
test ideas page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2015-16_Fundraising_ideas>.
Thanks again to everyone who has shared ideas so far.
This upcoming quarter will be our biggest of the year with campaigns in
Italy, France, the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. The
team is focused on providing the best donation invitation and experience
possible to readers. We will be sharing plenty of more information about
the upcoming campaigns over the next couple of months. Thank you for your
support!
--
Megan Hernandez
Director of Online Fundraising
Wikimedia Foundation