A memo to Wikimedia community, friends, staff, and other stakeholders.
On Monday, November 15, we will launch the 2010 annual fundraising drive for
the Wikimedia Foundation. As you know, our funding model relies on the support
of our friends and community members. Our average donation is about $25, and we
have received more than 500,000 donations in the lifetime of the foundation.
This year, we have to raise $16,000,000. That’s our biggest target yet, but
it’s still only a tiny fraction of what the other top-ten websites spend on
their operations. It’s critical that we reach our goal to maintain the
infrastructure necessary to keep Wikipedia and its sister sites running
smoothly.
We are a community that does great things, and does them routinely. As we
begin to bring this year's fundraiser to a close, we will launch our 10th
Anniversary year! It's hard to believe, isn't it? What would the world be
like, if the wiki hadn't launched? If we hadn't jumped in to grow it? If we
hadn't financially supported it? The world would be a far different -- and far
more sad -- place, I think. This 10th anniversary year provides an opportunity
for reflection and introspection, but it also provides a chance to refocus: to
plan, to build, to grow. We've just completed the strategic planning
initiative, and emerged with a cohesive, defined plan for the future growth and
development of the Foundation, the projects, and the movement. Now is the time.
So let's get going.
Since August, a team of dedicated staff members and volunteers has worked to
develop the fundraiser for this year. We committed early to radical and full
disclosure of all the data we had, in keeping with the spirit of the
transparent nature of the Wikimedia movement. We quickly identified three
major points in the donation process that were levers we could pull to
optimize the process: banner messaging, banner design, and landing/donation
pages.
Banner messaging:
Wikimedia fundraising has always been driven by site notices -- banners --
that run at the top of project websites. We’ve known for years that different
banner messages drive different numbers of people to click through and donate.
Therefore, this year we began the fundraiser by inviting community members to
propose new banner messages for us to test.
Almost 900 people were involved in the creation and discussion of potential
banner messages We tested dozens of iterations of banner designs, including
both graphical and text, and we will continue to do so.
Many of the new banners did well. Unfortunately, none of them came anywhere
near the 3% clickthrough rate of the winning banner from years past: “Please
read: a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”
But we’re going to keep trying. Our research indicates that banner wins because
it is simple and direct with no attempt at marketing or manipulation. So we’re
going to test, “A personal appeal from Wikimedia editor _” and later in
this memo, I’m going to invite you to be that editor and write an appeal for us
to use in the fundraiser.
Banner design:
In our testing this year, we also quickly learned that graphical banners
perform almost 100% better than text banners with the same message. Because of
this, we will obviously be using more graphic heavy banners than we have in
past campaigns.
Landing/donation pages:
Once a user clicks a banner, they land on a page that asks for a donation and
provides payment options. We have spent a lot of time and energy optimizing
those landing pages. Optimization of donation forms is an art and a science
that involves messaging, graphic design, and usability research.
We will have iterated through roughly 40 different designs before landing on
the ones that we'll launch with. We are committed to encouraging people to
beat us at our own game: we invite chapters and affiliated groups,
organizations, and Wikimedians to create their own landing pages that they
believe will work better than the ones we're running. If we see some that are
exciting, we'll test them, and run the ones that perform best!
In countries where there are Wikimedia chapters, the chapter has the option to
create their own landing page to test along side the default. We hope that
chapters will beat the default everywhere there is an attempt. In countries
where there are no chapters, we’d like active Wikimedians to contact us about
doing the same thing.
As we proceed through the campaign, we'll be constantly testing. We'll test
messages, banners, and landing pages. We'll also test timing, and font size,
and hundreds of other small variations. But we're doing it all with an eye to
integrity in data analysis, and an understanding of not only what the data
tells us, but what it doesn't tell us. Our decisions are grounded in fact and
well reasoned theories: not hunches or educated guesses.
One thing is very different this year, though. Once we
