Fundraising
The Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team cultivates the resources that propel our movement. Every year, we engage over 2 million people from countries across the world to support Wikipedia and its sister projects. The overwhelming majority of the Foundation's funding comes from individual readers from all over the world giving an average of $15.
Donations help the Wikimedia Foundation maintain server infrastructure, support global projects to increase the number of editors, improve the software that supports our projects, and make Wikipedia and its sister projects accessible globally to millions of people. The fundraising team is responsible for raising the Foundation's budget by running banners on Wikimedia sites. These banners have the additional goal to educate all readers about Wikipedia and how our movement works.
Goals
A Global Project
Readers around the world show their support for Wikimedia each year. The Wikimedia Foundation receives donations from nearly every country in the world in over 80 currencies, 20 payment methods, and 50 languages. We strive to provide readers worldwide with the best localized donation experience possible by offering preferred local payment methods and high quality messages in local languages. If you would like to help translate fundraising messages, please get involved.
Testing and Optimization
The online fundraiser is based on constant testing and optimization of different themes, messages, designs and user flows. We aim to educate all Wikipedia readers about our movement, provide a convenient donation process, and minimize the disruption of fundraiser banners on the reader experience. Only a tiny portion of readers donate -- therefore, we must always be improving our methods.
For more background on testing over the past several years, please see our fundraising reports from 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.
Educating Readers
Another goal of the fundraiser is to educate Wikipedia readers about the Wikimedia movement. We do this through the messages displayed in banners as well as through creative content featuring the Wikimedia community. Over the years, we've run personal appeal messages from community members, featured videos introducing Wikimedia volunteers, and invited readers to join in editing.
Frequently Asked Questions
- We have an FAQ for donors and one for community members.
Communication
- Please stay in contact with us on the fundraising talk page.
- IRC channel: #wikimedia-fundraisingconnect (publicly logged)
- Mailing list: fundraiser (archive). This is the open-subscription and public successor of the now closed private fundraising list (see Mailing lists/Fundraising).
- To report bugs in phabricator, please use the #wikimeda-fundraising tag
- For a breakdown of how fundraising tech uses phabricator, check out this wikitech page.
Latest Updates
2015-2016 Q1 Update
The Wikimedia Foundation has just wrapped up the first quarter of the 2015-16 fiscal year. Over these past three months, the fundraising team has been running ran campaigns in Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Belgium and Luxembourg and prepared for the upcoming year-end English fundraising campaign. The online fundraising team missed the $6 million goal for the quarter due to postponing the Italy fundraiser to October to support the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. We raised roughly $5.7 million in the first quarter of the year and plan to make up for the loss in the next quarter. The 2014-15 fiscal year fundraising report was also posted in this quarter. If you haven’t read it yet, please do check out the report for a wealth of information on the last fiscal year.
The team has used this first quarter to test a wide variety of brand new banners. From images, to banners highlighting photos from Commons, and different messages, we’ve found a few new ways to share the fundraising message with Wikipedia readers. With updated designs, we’ve ended the quarter with a banner that performs roughly 20% better than the best- performing banner from last quarter. Better performing banners are required to raise a higher budget with declining traffic. We’ll continue testing new banners into the next quarter and sharing highlights as we go.
The banner message has also been updated with suggestions from the Wikimedia community. Thank you to everyone who has suggested improvements so far! We have changed “We survive on donations averaging about $15” to “We are sustained by donations averaging about $15.” We’ve also changed “Please help us end the fundraiser and get back to improving Wikipedia” to “Please help us end the fundraiser and improve Wikipedia.” These message edits did not positively or negatively affect donations and were made in response to community feedback. In the past, we have also relied on community feedback to improve our campaigns. In the last year, community feedback has led to improvements to the usability of the close X icon and a new line to highlight the editing community, “Wikipedia is written by a community of volunteers with a passion for sharing the world’s knowledge.” All of these community suggestions remain in the banner. Another sentence that was briefly tested on a small percentage of users about a year ago that received negative community feedback was “If everyone reading this gave $3, we could keep it online and ad-free another year.” We did not end up using that sentence for the campaign and we commit to not using it in any future campaign. In the next quarter, we are planning many more message tests -- with both brand new ideas as well as smaller tweaks to the existing text. If you have an idea to test, please share on the 2015-16 test ideas page. Thanks again to everyone who has shared ideas so far.
This upcoming quarter will be our biggest of the year with campaigns in Italy, France, the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. The team is focused on providing the best donation invitation and experience possible to readers. We will be sharing plenty of more information about the upcoming campaigns over the next couple of months. Thank you for your support! MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
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Best performing banner July 2015 -
Trees Banner Example -
Commons photo banner example -
Commons photo banner example -
Commons photo banner example -
Graphic banner example -
Text and graphic banner example -
Text and graphic banner example -
Best banner from September 2015 -- a 20% improvement over the best banner from July 2015.
2014-2015 Fundraising Report
The fundraising team is happy to share the report on the 2014-15 fiscal year fundraising. Please take a look at the report and we look forward to your feedback on the report talk page.
Thank you to Wikimedia volunteers, readers, donors, staff and fundraising team for making this the most successful year yet. MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 01:28, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Articles, videos etc. (here you find relevant articles about Wikimedia fundraising and finance)
Building a secure financial future for Wikipedia by Lisa Seitz Gruwell
Foundation 360 Building the relationships and resources we need to thrive Interview with Megan Hernandez, Advancement Department
The finances of free knowledge Lessons in transparency and impact by Jaime Villagomez
Annual Plan Conversations - Advancement and Finance and Administration Departments watch Lisa Seitz Gruwell and Jaime Villagomez take questions around the 2021/22 annual plan.
Five reasons Wikipedia needs your support (post supporting the 2021 English banner fundraising campaign) by Pats Pena
7 reasons you should donate to Wikipedia by Lisa Seitz Gruwell
2023/24 Q3 Update
In Q3 we worked with a range of communities to prepare for fundraising campaigns starting in Q4. We created community collaboration pages with affiliates, engaged communities on wiki, and in community calls.
We had plenty of email campaigns during Q3, which included the Thank You email campaign (for donors from the English campaign in Q2), an email sent to Austria, Norway, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malaysia, and Belgium, an email sent to Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, as well as and email sent to some of our English campaign donors about the Endowment.
We also started our campaign in Brazil at the end of Q3.
Some highlights from the Brazil campaign:
Brazil payments improvements: Last year we worked on reintegrating DLocal, our LATAM payment processor. Modernizing our payments integration had a significant impact on the Brazil campaign leading to a 32% increase in payments conversion rate and an increase in recurring giving! This newer integration is having a lasting impact. Donors are also sharing their appreciation for Pix as a payment option (see donor quote below!). Pix is the most popular way donors like to contribute from Brazil!
Finally, I'm thrilled to share that Brazilian donors are incredibly grateful for the Pix payment option, allowing those eager to donate to finally contribute!
In Q4 we are launching banner campaigns across many countries and we will also start preparing for the next English campaign by engaging the English Wikipedia communities from Q1 on, with the start of our pre-tests.
2023/24 Q2 Update
During Q2 we ran two major fundraising campaigns. Our annual English fundraising campaign in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the US had both emails sent to previous donors as well as banners on English Wikipedia for non logged in readers. From Q1 onwards, when the pre-tests for our biggest campaign started, we collaborated with the community on English Wikipedia through a dedicated community collaboration page. A few highlights of the collaborative results we achieved together, are:
- We introduced language around the role of Wikipedia in relation to AI to our banners
- We worked around the concept of time sensitivity to encourage readers to donate now rather than later
- We increased clarity that the messages come from WMF by adding our organizational logo to all banners.
- We made it easier for readers to stop seeing banners for example increasing the duration for which a reader could dismiss banners for
- We made improvements to our payment methods and options, including tests to simplify the Venmo checkout flow, and a major milestone of releasing in-app Apple Pay transactions with the Wikipedia Apps team.
- Donors also saw an invitation to start editing on the Thank You page, after they donated. This led to 4,398 new account creations, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours (a constructive edit means the edit wasn’t subsequently reverted within 48 hours).
The English banner campaign reached the revenue target and our progress towards the annual goal is looking good. We are currently at around 75% to our annual goal and still have campaigns in both Q3 and Q4 coming up that will help us reach the goal by the end of the financial year. We’ll carry learnings from the English campaign forward as we collaborate with local communities on the upcoming campaigns.
We also ran our annual fundraising banner campaign in Italy during October. For this we collaborated with the community on Italian Wikipedia and hosted a community call.
Looking ahead, we are engaging and collaborating with the communities across the globe (you can find the list of all collaboration pages that are currently live, on meta) to ensure that our fundraising campaigns are received well locally and that our communities have the input they would like to have.
See also
- Erik Moeller and Domas Mituzas on fundraising since 2010