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 2018-2019 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
    Lead Development Outreach Manager

  • Jerry Kim
    Senior Events Projects Manager

  • Jonathan Curiel
    Senior Development Comms Manager

  • Nora Nichols
    Development Data Associate

  • Rosie Lewis
    Development Analyst

Fundraising Operations

  • Jessica Robell
    Director of Fundraising Operations

  • Michael Beattie
    Donor Services Manager

  • Kristie Robinson
    Donor Services Associate

  • Sandra Hust
    Donor Services Associate

  • Leanne Schreibstein
    Fundraising Operations Specialist

Endowment

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

Global[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Foundation

  • Japan Banners: September 1st - September 29th 2020
  • US, GB, NZ, AU, CA, IE Emails: September 14th - December 11th 2020
  • France Banners: September 29th - October 27th 2020
  • US, GB, NZ, AU, CA, IE - Banner Testing (1-3 hours, one to several times a week): July 2020 onwards

Germany[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Deutschland

  • Fundraising testing: Juli 2020 - November 2020
  • Fundraising Banners: November 2020 - December 31 2020

Switzerland[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Switzerland

  • Fundraising Banner Testing: August 1st - November 15th 2020
  • Fundraising Banner Fundraising: November 15th - December 30th 2020

Contact Us

Fundraising updates

2020/2021 Q1 Update[edit]

It’s been a very busy start to the beginning of this financial year. We displayed fundraising banners in the Netherlands through the month of July and completed our first major fundraising campaign in India in August. Email campaigns ran in France and Japan, and we’ve just launched our Japan banner campaign. We also resumed our Multilingual Bundle campaign which runs in 12 countries at a low level, which we paused at the beginning of the pandemic to allow the team to adjust plans and our messaging to reflect the new norm we find ourselves in.

The big end of year fundraising campaign on the English Wikipedia takes significant amounts of preparation and we’ve been “pre-testing” all through the summer. Our email campaign has just started this week and we expect the full banner campaign to launch at the end of November. We’ve begun work on our 2019-2020 fundraising report and that will come out later this financial year. In the meantime you can check out the final tuning session for Q4 of the 2019-2020 financial year.

We’d also like to share some recent departures and arrivals in the fundraising team. Caitlin Cogdill, one of our Senior Managers in Online Fundraising, departed to take up a new opportunity. The whole of the fundraising team and staff across the Wikimedia Foundation wish her well for the future and thank her for her significant contributions. We welcome Haley Nordeen to our production team, where she will be supporting our banner campaigns. And finally, Advancement would like to thank Nick Wilson for his support and guidance whilst Joseph Seddon was on secondment. Seddon has now returned and is supporting the whole Advancement department.

2019/2020 Q2&Q3 Update[edit]

The 2018/2019 Fundraising Report was posted in September, and translations are now available in Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. This is our first year translating the report. We are excited to share our findings with a wider audience.

The Foundation had Tuning sessions (quarterly updates) for the Advancement department in October and in January.

In Q4 (April-June), we will be conducting some limited banner testing in the USA. We use brief tests (1-3 hours) to collate necessary data to inform future projections, as well as to test backend changes. Due to the significant global changes over the last few months we felt it vital to gather this now in order to help inform annual and long term planning for the Wikimedia Foundation, and by extension the broader movement.

In housekeeping news, Seddon is temporarily on secondment to the Product Department. Please refer all questions relating to Fundraising and CentralNotice to User:Quiddity (WMF) until the end of June.

Archive[edit]

For past updates, please see our update archive.


See also

Discussion
Technical
Quarterly reviews/check-ins
Tuning sessions
Reports
Archives
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