[Wikipedia-l] Small fund-rising improvements.

[Krzysztof Kowalczyk]

I was just looking on Foundation's fund-rising page and have two comments.

1. I think that "Merchandise" and "Donations" should be separated,
similar to what http://www.mozilla.org/ does. I believe more people
would visit "Merchandise" or "WikiPedia merchandise" resulting in more
sales => more funding. I believe that because in people's minds
"donating" and "buying cool stuff" (even if it ultimately leads to
funding a good cause) is strongly separated.

In more specific terms, things that could be done:
* a link to "Merchandise" on main wikipedia.org page, in the nav
section, next to "Donations" link
* this link goes to a separate page on foundation's website which only
deals with merchandise (and not all donations options)

In general I think that foundation should study what Mozilla project
does for fundraising as they are not larger/more visible project but
according to http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110721 they
do much better at getting funding via. t-shirt sales ($15,000.00 for
mozilla vs. $460.90 for wikipedia).

Things that I think mozilla.org does better:
* much nicer web design. No offense, but
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising is bad, both functionally
(it's hard to read, the copy isn't that great) and visually (compare
to http://www.mozillastore.com/products/clothing)
* selling t-shirts on open-source conventions (linuxcon/oscon/devday)
which is what http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110721
implies that mozilla foundation is doing (I don't really know, I
haven't been there)

2. More t-shirt designs.

I think that a design that gives emphasis on personal involvement in
the project would be more attractive to people than a generic design
with a logo. E.g. designs with teksts such as "I contribute to
WikiPedia.org" or "I wrote for Encyclopedia \n wikipedia.org", "I
write Encyclopedia articles \n wikipedia.org". I'm not claiming that
exactly this wording should be used - I just want to give an example
of what I mean (emphasis on contributing/writing for
WikiPedia/Encyclopedia).

Also, I think that Mozilla's "$50 donation t-shirt"
(http://www.mozillastore.com/products/donations/50shirt) is a good
idea. It could even had a text that says that e.g. "I donated to
WikiPedia", "I make Free Encyclopedia possible", "I fund Free
Encyclopedia" - something along those lines.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info