Hi all, This type of fundraising is -- by its very nature -- obtrusive. We are thinking about other options. But, as with anything, "every action has equal and opposite reaction". Anything we do, we have to consider the consequences and we will find flaws.
Now for the specifics: Yes -- the fundraising team works incredibly hard to optimize and adjust to changes in our environment and to minimize obtrusiveness (there are multiple ways to measure this: total impressions, % conversions, size, parallelizing campaigns, etc.). It is a complex multi-variable equation. Fundraising uses A/B tests to do much of the optimization, but they also use surveys, user tests, and sentiment analysis. Some of what you see is counter-intuitive (even to me, and I have experience with this), but they work. All of this year's tests showed minimal brand impact even from the overlay screen. That said, going forward we are considering an unbiased 3rd party to do some of this analysis. No -- we are not perfect we are constantly working at improving. There are a million opinions on how this should be done, and then there is research and live data. This year we made only minimal changes to the text of the banner. Next year we are going to play with different messaging, and the team will welcome you suggestions. Finally thank you for supporting the team. They are literally locked-up in a room and working around the clock! Lila On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 8:44 AM, pajz <pajzm...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3 December 2014 at 14:09, Liam Wyatt <liamwy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Dear WMF Fundraising team, please do not take this thread (or this email) > > as an attack on yourselves or the professionalism that you apply to your > > work. > > > > I would suspect that what drives this is indeed the professionalism of the > Fundraising team. I don't mean to be overly speculative, but what we are > talking about here is an issue that doesn't readily translate into metrics. > Creating and gathering metrics for "damage to the Wikipedia brand" would be > extremely difficult and expensive. On the other hand, creating and > gathering metrics for "the number/amount/... of donations received" is easy > and cheap. Relatedly, "damage to the Wikipedia brand" is not something the > impact of which you feel directly, while "the number/amount/... of > donations received" is something that immediately translates into WMF's > budget. > > So I assume the Fundraising team is in a somewhat uncomfortable position > here. Getting them to change the way they run the campaigns might, in this > case, really not work on its own; rather, in my view, any decision on this > likely has to come from the very top of the Foundation (those that > Fundraising reports to), who, to some degree, have to place their gut > feeling over the implications derived from the available/feasible set of > hard quantitative metrics. > > Cheers, > Patrik > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
