Fundraising

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This is a general information page on Wikimedia fundraising. If you wish to make a donation, please visit https://donate.wikimedia.org

Who are we?

The Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team cultivates the resources that propel our movement. We engage millions of people from countries across the globe 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, 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 Wikimedia Foundation's budget through online campaigns. These campaigns have the additional goal to educate all readers about Wikipedia and how our movement works. We are grateful for all the readers, contributors, and donors who make Wikipedia and our other projects a global home for knowledge and discovery. To continue thriving we must constantly innovate, adapting to the changing needs of our readers and new advances in the technology that powers the Wikimedia universe. For additional information, please see the 2017-2018 Fundraising Report.

The Teams

Central

Working across teams and with the Partnerships team

Online Fundraising

Foundations & Major Gifts

  • Caitlin Virtue
    Senior Director of Development

  • Danny Kaufman
    Development Outreach Manager

  • Leanne Schreibstein
    Development Associate

  • Jerry Kim
    Events Projects Manager

  • Jonathan Curiel
    Senior Development Comms Manager

  • Nora Nichols
    Development Data Associate

  • Rosie Lewis
    Development Analyst

Fundraising Operations

Endowment

  • Kaitlin Thaney
    Endowment Director

  • Marc Brent
    Senior Endowment Development Manager

See also: Fundraising Technology

Our 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.

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.

Educating Readers

2012 Editor Video

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.

Current fundraising activities

English[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Foundation

  • Big English Banner Testing: October 1st - November 31st 2019
  • Big English Email: October 7th - January 3rd 2019
  • Big English Main Campaign (Banners): December 1st - December 31st 2019
  • Big English Main Campaign (Portal): December 1st - December 31st 2019
  • Big English Main Campaign (App): December 1st - December 31st 2019
  • Big English Thank you Campaign (Banners): January 1st - January 14th 2019

Germany[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Deutschland

  • German Main Campaign: November 15th - December 31st 2019

Switzerland[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Switzerland

  • German, Italian, French and English banner testing: October 14th - December 1st 2019
  • German, Italian, French and English Main Campaign (Banners): December 1st - December 31st 2019


Contact Us

Fundraising updates

2019/2020 Q1 Update[edit]

Just a quick update for the beginning of the financial year. We are in the midst of finalising our Fundraising report that covers our fundraising activities for the previous financial year. 2018/2019 was a really strong year for fundraising and we are excited to provide the community with a summary view of our online, major gift and endowment teams efforts.

With the new financial year we've already run our first email campaigns in July and our first banner campaign in Japan scheduled to start September 1. We've also started preparations for our Autumn English campaign which is our biggest campaign of the year. Through the summer up and right until [Giving Tuesday] we are running weekly tests, preparing our content and ensuring our systems are operating at their best.

This year will also hopefully see us returning to fundraising in India. We've already started working with community members, affiliates, and readers, to localise our fundraising content and this work will continue through to the first half of 2020.

We have a number of team members at Wikimania in Stockholm so if you have any questions look for Seddon, Megan, Peter, Moska, Jack or David! If you are looking for us, why not drop a message in the Wikimania2019 telegram chat.

Archive[edit]

For past updates, please see our update archive.


See also


Discussion
Technical
Quarterly reviews/check-ins
Reports
Archives
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