Fundraising
The Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team cultivates the resources that propel our movement. Every year, we engage over 2 million people from nearly every country in 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 at the top of Wikipedia articles. These banners have the additional goal to educate all readers about Wikipedia and how our movement works.
Contents
A Global Project[edit]
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[edit]
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 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.
Educating Readers[edit]
A primary 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[edit]
- We have an FAQ for donors and one for community members.
Communication[edit]
- 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).
Latest Updates[edit]
2013 Campaign Wrap-up Update[edit]
Happy New Year! We successfully wrapped up the fundraiser in December, big thanks to everyone whose hard work made this possible.
We're working on a full report to share, but in the mean-time, here are a few quick facts to hold you over:
- In December, the fundraising team ran the year-end online campaign in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
- The campaign ran full blast for two weeks.
- Roughly $18.7 million USD was raised from more than one million donors in December (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling).
- Year-to-date, approximately $32 million has been raised from online fundraising banners.
- The team created and tested approximately 250 different banners.
- We sent 2.6 million emails to donors from previous years asking them to give again.
- We responded to 15,000 reader emails during the month of December.
All full report will be posted publicly in 2014. We're currently preparing to run campaigns in all other countries and languages. The multilingual campaigns will be spread out throughout 2014. Heads up: We will need help translating messages and localizing the fundraiser. If you're interested in helping out, please let us know.
Thanks for all the support and keep an eye out for more updates.
Meganhernandez (talk) 13:06, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
Archive[edit]
For past updates, please see the 2013 updates page.
