Hello All!
So originally we were going to send an update after the first two weeks but
with so much going on and following feedback, I'll cover as much as I can
in as brief a form as possible and more regularly than planned:
-
Banners limited: We have already begun limiting the number of times a
reader will see a banner within a single browser if they choose to not
dismiss the banners. For the moment, dismissing a banner or viewing a
banner *up to 10 times* will result in the banners being suppressed for
a period of 1 week.
-
Big messaging update [1]: We've been playing heavily with the ideas of
“fake news” and “facts matter”. In addition for first time since 2013, we
have returned to an appeal coming from a specific individual, in this case
Jimmy. Much of the inspiration for both came from interviews Fundraising
did with both Jimmy and Katherine back in October.
-
Big design update & in-line banners: We've moved away from the dark navy
blue (seen as black by many people), which was considered by the community
to be too mobid and foreboding, to a white background banner with red
border. Following extensive testing we also moved to inline banners over
the weekend replacing the top header banners.
-
Promising Numbers: Currently we believe that we have raised around
$13,000,000 (accounting for payments to be cleared). This has been helped
enormously by both gains found in our banner campaigns that is allowing us
to keep pace with the decline of desktop, as well as a brilliantly
performing e-mail campaign.
-
Awesome E-mail: November 30th 2016 saw our biggest day for email
fundraising ~$950,000 (2016) vs ~$550,000 (2015) raised in a 24 hour period
with approximately a similar number of e-mails.
-
Stable Tech: This year has been extremely stable from a technical
standpoint compared to other years, with the most perplexing issue being an
odd dip that occurred in our donations and traffic [2] on December 1st for
one hour. This occurred during the quietest period in a day for 2 days but
then appeared to stop. Low impact but naturally could be a bigger issue if
the problem occurred during peak fundraising hours or was more prolonged,
investigations continue.
-
Major gifts going great: Our major gifts team have been very busy, and
have seen double the number of Major gifts donations during this period of
the year compared with last year which means this page [3] getting a lot of
updates recently.
-
A brilliant social media team: In short awesome work has been done by
them but I will send a separate more detailed update on this :)
[1] -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein?banner=B1617_1117_en6C_dsk_p1…
[2] -
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T152122
[3] -
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
--
Seddon
*Advancement Associate (Community Engagement)*
*Wikimedia Foundation*