I read the official blog [1] about it, but it doesn't have rationale. And I am too lazy to analyze it.
So, may someone give us the reasons why this fundraising finished so quickly.
I have to say that I'm very positively surprised by this fact, as I was much more pessimistic in relation to the future fundraising.
The main question -- which could be just guessed if we have accurate rationale for this fundraising record -- is how sustainable is the growth (or even the stagnation with this amount of money)?
In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global social changes. Although it would be great if the world is changing so quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the organization.
On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 1:51 AM, Milos Rancic [email protected] wrote:
In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global social changes. Although it would be great if the world is changing so quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the organization.
I greatly believe this is the product staff's work. I was a part of Fundraising 2010 for the WMF as a part-time contractor, and I've closely followed the work of the fundraising team since. Megan Hernandez and her team have learned and grown each year, as has Zack and his work with the team, on meta, and here. The track record is quite clear, people are not contributing in the English language markets this year as opposed to last because of trends when the English Wikipedia's popularity has not significantly changed.
Kudos to Fundraising 2012. I saw about three banners and you met your target in record time.
I'd really like to hear something more than a guess :) In the sense: Could it be said that we are now reasonably financially safe?
On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Milos Rancic [email protected] wrote:
I read the official blog [1] about it, but it doesn't have rationale. And I am too lazy to analyze it.
So, may someone give us the reasons why this fundraising finished so quickly.
I have to say that I'm very positively surprised by this fact, as I was much more pessimistic in relation to the future fundraising.
The main question -- which could be just guessed if we have accurate rationale for this fundraising record -- is how sustainable is the growth (or even the stagnation with this amount of money)?
In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global social changes. Although it would be great if the world is changing so quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the organization.
Milos -
I'm very sorry I didn't answer this question earlier...
On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 1:51 AM, Milos Rancic [email protected] wrote:
I read the official blog [1] about it, but it doesn't have rationale. And I am too lazy to analyze it.
So, may someone give us the reasons why this fundraising finished so quickly.
The short answer is: credit goes to a new kind of banner that put several powerful sentences (powerful for getting donations) directly into the banner. The text in the banner included several of the ideas from the appeals that used to be on our landing pages, plus some new ideas. There were a few other design changes that increased the donations too.
All these changes seem obvious in hindsight. But it took a lot of testing to get there. You can see some of the tests we did on this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Breakthrough
One thing that helped a lot was finding some new designers who were willing to do very plain and simple designs and work with us to make very subtle modifications to them week after week. For some reason it was very hard to find designers willing to do that kind of unglamorous work.
I have to say that I'm very positively surprised by this fact, as I was much more pessimistic in relation to the future fundraising.
The main question -- which could be just guessed if we have accurate rationale for this fundraising record -- is how sustainable is the growth (or even the stagnation with this amount of money)?
There is room for confusion here. Just because we dramatically shortened the campaign doesn't mean we can dramatically increase the money we raise. As our banners get more effective, part of what happens is that we just get the same pool of donors to donate faster. But better banners do also increase the total pool of donors too.
We do know that this year the decay of fundraising from day to day was steeper than in past years, confirming that we were eating into out existing donor pool faster than before.
In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making $150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't littering the sites with banners for little return.
In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global social changes.
There did not seem to be any underlying changes in the world that gave us this lift. In fact, we probably received less of a lift this year from growing readership because so much of the growth was in mobile (where, I'm sorry to say, we haven't begun fundraising consistently).
Several months ago, it felt to us like the world was getting a lot worse for fundraising. Part of why we looked so hard for these new banners was that the old banners started performing terribly in our weekly testing. So we were extremely relieved when we finally found these new banners that worked so well.
Our mission on the WMF fundraising is to minimize the impact of fundraising on Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects while using fundraising as an opportunity to educate our users about the uniqueness and beauty of the Wikimedia movement. We're really happy that we reduced the impact significantly this year and had more time to talk about the projects and their editors in our "thank you" campaign at the end of December.
We're thinking now about how to make it all 10 times better in 2013!
Thanks for your optimism Milos!
Although it would be great if the world is changing so quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the organization.
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Zack Exley wrote:
In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making $150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't littering the sites with banners for little return.
Thank you for the very detailed reply. I'm highlighting just this paragraph to say thank you to the fundraising team again for all of its work to reduce the time the banners spend on the site. This is fantastic. :-)
In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I think you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some choices about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of banners) after evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to readers and editors) versus their benefit (increase in donations, decrease in fundraising banner time, etc.). I realize it's January and that the next annual fundraiser is many months away, but do you have any idea when this year you'll be having a discussion about these trade-offs and where?
MZMcBride
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, MZMcBride [email protected] wrote:
Zack Exley wrote:
In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making $150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't
littering
the sites with banners for little return.
Thank you for the very detailed reply. I'm highlighting just this paragraph to say thank you to the fundraising team again for all of its work to reduce the time the banners spend on the site. This is fantastic. :-)
In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I think you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some choices about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of banners) after evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to readers and editors) versus their benefit (increase in donations, decrease in fundraising banner time, etc.). I realize it's January and that the next annual fundraiser is many months away, but do you have any idea when this year you'll be having a discussion about these trade-offs and where?
Any suggestions about how that might best be done? There are so few people who participate on this list that I would say this isn't a good place to measure the feelings of either WM contributions or readers.
There's also the problem of people not necessarily knowing what actually annoys them or interferes with their experience the most when it's being discussed in the abstract.
And surveys of course have their problems.
Moreover, what are the important questions? What do some editors find objectionable from an aesthetic point of view? (Even though we are now sparing logged in users completely.) What gets in the way of readers' use of the site? Or other more nuanced questions about readers' reactions? For example, do some choices cause readers to perceive banners as ads, cause confusion or possibly reduce readership?
Any thoughts?
MZMcBride
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Zack Exley wrote:
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, MZMcBride [email protected] wrote:
In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I think you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some choices about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of banners) after evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to readers and editors) versus their benefit (increase in donations, decrease in fundraising banner time, etc.). I realize it's January and that the next annual fundraiser is many months away, but do you have any idea when this year you'll be having a discussion about these trade-offs and where?
Any suggestions about how that might best be done? There are so few people who participate on this list that I would say this isn't a good place to measure the feelings of either WM contributions or readers.
Meta-Wiki (https://meta.wikimedia.org/).
I agree that this list is not representative of the Wikimedia community (and no forum will ever be truly representative), but I don't think that's important here.
There's also the problem of people not necessarily knowing what actually annoys them or interferes with their experience the most when it's being discussed in the abstract.
I don't follow. There are about a million test wikis available, including test.wikipedia.org, test2.wikipedia.org, and an entire Wikimedia Labs cluster that can be used for testing banners. You're absolutely right that discussing banners and annoyance in the abstract would be useless, I just have no idea why anyone ever would. There are about eleven months till the start of the next annual fundraiser. In that time, I think it should be possible to come up with a few demos for the community to evaluate and assess.
And surveys of course have their problems.
I don't follow. This doesn't seem to have stopped the Wikimedia Foundation or any other organization on Earth from (regularly) using surveys.
Moreover, what are the important questions? What do some editors find objectionable from an aesthetic point of view? (Even though we are now sparing logged in users completely.) What gets in the way of readers' use of the site? Or other more nuanced questions about readers' reactions? For example, do some choices cause readers to perceive banners as ads, cause confusion or possibly reduce readership?
Well, are we sparing logged in users completely? Who determines that? Is that documented anywhere?
There are many ways to annoy readers. Generally anything that invades the content area of the site (which is physically marked on the page with borders) is off-limits and inappropriate to me. Others may disagree, particularly if there's enough of a financial gain. These are the types of discussions that need to be had.
It's always possible to do a full splash-screen and it would probably bring in a lot of money, but I don't think anyone is advocating for such an approach. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is having no banners at all and relying on simple word-of-mouth. The grey areas in between these two extremes need further thought and consideration. Meta-Wiki is the place for this.
Any thoughts?
Your questions are a bit silly. :-)
MZMcBride
On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:26 PM, Zack Exley [email protected] wrote:
I'm very sorry I didn't answer this question earlier...
Thanks for the response! I thought that I'd get it, so I was mostly patient :)
The short answer is: credit goes to a new kind of banner that put several powerful sentences (powerful for getting donations) directly into the banner. The text in the banner included several of the ideas from the appeals that used to be on our landing pages, plus some new ideas. There were a few other design changes that increased the donations too. ...
I am happy to hear both: that the success is the product of professional work and that the cause for it is known :)
I'd also like to personally thank to the fundraising team. Gloomy perspective of Wikimedia funding was inside of the top of my first world problems (although I was consoled by the fact that I am living in the first world, finally). Everything looks better now :)
Off topic: It is really bizarre to realize that the funding of the biggest encyclopedia in the history of humans depends on design of banners. Without the context of the Internet Era, it's almost comparable to the connection between animist rituals and good harvest.