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 2016-2017 Fundraising Report.

The Teams

Online Fundraising

Foundations & Major Gifts

  • Caitlin Virtue
    Director of Development

  • Jonathan Curiel
    Senior Development Comms Manager

  • Danny Kaufman
    Development Outreach Manager

  • Jerry Kim
    Events Projects Manager

  • Nora Nichols
    Development Analyst

  • Leanne Schreibstein
    Development Associate

Endowment

  • Kaitlin Thaney
    Endowment Director

  • Marc Brent
    Senior Endowment Development Manager

Fundraising Operations

  • Pats Pena
    Director, Payments and Fundraising Operations

  • Michael Beattie
    Donor Services Manager

  • Kristie Robinson
    Donor Services Associate

  • Joseph Seddon
    Community & Audience Engagement Associate

Also see: 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.

Contact Us

Fundraising updates

Q2 Update and Summary[edit]

Hey All

The end of the year is extremely productive, rewarding and very busy for the Wikimedia Fundraising team with fundraising occurring in 14 countries and 4 languages. Just a quick update on our fundraising activities.

Online Fundraising[edit]

We were originally scheduled to run a fundraising Campaign in JAPAN through September. Following the landfall of Typhoon Jebi, and extensive damage to the country, we as a team decided to delay the fundraising campaign to the first half of 2019.

Since the beginning of October we have been running our desktop fundraising banners in FRANCE. Mobile launched on Tuesday 9th. The banner campaign is scheduled to run to the end of October.

During the months of October and November we are also ramping up our preparations for our main English fundraising banner campaign in USA, CANADA, UK, IRELAND, NEW ZEALAND and AUSTRALIA. As with previous years, that means running banners on English Wikipedia and emailing past donors.

Regular banner testing will continue and intensify through the months of October and November. This testing consists of a series of single and multi hour tests and will increase in cadence as we get closer to December. We do this to explore new ideas, test systems, improve workflows etc all in time for the busiest period of the year. As previous years, the main push will begin on or around Giving Tuesday, November 27.[1] We will look to fundraise through the month of December.

E-mail fundraising in these countries has already begun where we ask previous donors to reaffirm their support to Wikimedia. Just like the banner campaign, we extensively test our appeals. The email campaign started over the last week and will continue steadily through the rest of this calendar year.

Another upcoming campaign will be Latin America consisting of BRAZIL, PERU, URUGUAY, ARGENTINA, MEXICO, CHILE, COLOMBIA. We have worked closely with the Iberocoop communities and affiliates in these areas to localise the banner language. This campaign will be using a slightly different format, running at a low percentage of page views and over a longer time period. We are excited to see how this improves the effects of the campaign on both community and the fundraising team.

Major Gifts and Endowment[edit]

This week we announced a $2 million gift to the Wikimedia Endowment from George Soros, founder of the Open Society Foundation. [2] Also announced recently, Amazon recently gave $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment. This is an important acknowledgement by the Internet retailer of the need for the future sustainability of the Wikimedia Projects. [3] Since the launch of the endowment in January 2016, the endowment has raised over $27.5 million from generous donors, philanthropists, and Wikimedia community members.


There are a number of ways you can help support the fundraiser:

  • Have specific ideas or stories we should tell via social media, banners, emails etc.? We’re also looking for nice images, if you could point us to your favorites from Commons. Please add them to our fundraising ideas page. [4]
  • If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a Phabricator ticket. [5]
  • If you see a donor on a talk page, OTRS, or social media with questions about donating or having difficulties in the donation process, please refer them to donate@wikimedia.org.

We look forward to working with you all in the coming weeks.

Many thanks Seddon (WMF) (talk) 03:46, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giving_Tuesday

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/09/25/amazon-gift-wikimedia-endowment/

[3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/10/15/george-soros-invests-future-free-open-knowledge/

[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2017-18_Fundraising_ideas

[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/1/?template=118862


FY1718 Fundraising Report released[edit]

The fundraising team has published the FY1718 Fundraising Report. We invite you to read our overview of the last year of fundraising at the foundation and learn more about our strategy, methodology, successes, and future opportunities.

Archive[edit]

For past updates, please see our update archive.


See also


Discussion
Technical
Quarterly reviews/check-ins
Reports
Archives
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