[Wikimedia-l] Fundraising Update - Big English Fundraiser

Hello! We are coming up to that time of year again with the launch of our English fundraiser. Our E-mail campaign is already underway and in a little under three weeks time, the banner campaign will launch in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland on Giving Tuesday [1], November 29, 2016. We will continue to try and limit the disruption from these banners. Our current expectation is to run our banners for all traffic for the first two weeks. Following that we will some combination of either reducing the amount of traffic being shown banners or the number of times a banner is shown to each user. There will then be one last final push before the end of December. It is my hope to update you after both of these stages with our progress. It is certainly no secret that it is a very important period for fundraising as our December activities are responsible for raising around 45% of all movement funds. As we reported in last years fundraising report [2] and at the September metrics meeting [3] we continue to adapt to the shift in our readership from desktop to mobile. Over the last two years, our e-mail efforts have played an increasingly major role in our fundraising to counter this shift and will certainly be the case over the next two months. As always it’s critical for my team to have both broader staff and community input in our fundraising efforts. This year we have been working closely with the Reading product team along with members from both the Reading and Editing design teams to improve our fundraising flow, in particular, trying to keep closer to the new standardised Wikimedia UI guidelines [4]. In addition to this, over the last five months we ran a number of staff and community feedback sessions and we have been very grateful to everyone who took part in those. They proved very successful in providing both a constructive critical eye for existing banner and email appeals as well being a source for a plethora of new ideas. The plan is that we will run more of these in conjunction with some of our major campaigns throughout the year. This will start with a series of sessions focusing on the English Campaign and would like to invite you all to a number of session being run over the next two weeks: * Thursday 17th November @ 1300 UTC * Thursday 17th November @ 1900 UTC * Monday 21st November @ 0100 UTC Please do sign up and find out more information [5]. Participation will be via IRC, Youtube live & via Google Hangout for ease of participation. As always if you have ideas and are not able to participate in these sessions you can leave feedback on our Fundraising Ideas page where you can see links to our current fundraising banners and current appeal text [5]. Over the last year: use of Phabricator [6] for bug reporting; event and related content specific banners; improving the ease with which to dismiss banners; numerous improvements to the language used; and country specific images all came about from suggestions made on that page. So please do keep the ideas coming and I would like to thank you all in advance both for your input into the campaigns but more importantly the awesome work in building one of the largest sources of freely accessible knowledge in human history. I look forward to working with you all in the coming weeks. Many Thanks -- Seddon *Advancement Associate (Community Engagement)* *Wikimedia Foundation* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giving_Tuesday [2] 2015-2016 WMF Fundraising Report: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Fundraising_Report [3] September 2016 Metrics Meeting Presentation: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/September_2016_Monthly_… [4] Wikimedia Design Guide Color palettes https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/M82 Collection of widgets: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/M101 Demo widgets in OOjs UI: https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/demos/#widgets-mediawiki-ltr [5] To sign up for a feedback session - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/Community_Feedback_Series_2#Ses… [6] To suggest new banners ideas visit the test ideas meta page - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2016-17_Fundraising_ideas [7] To file a bug report or technical issue, please create a phabricator Ticket - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?template=118862