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 2019-2020 Fundraising Report.

The Teams

Central

Working across teams and with the Partnerships team

Online Fundraising

  • Pats Pena
    Sr. Director, Online Fundraising

  • Sam Patton
    Senior Manager, Fundraising Growth and Innovation

  • Evelyn Martin
    Principal Payments Officer

  • Mariana Suijkerbuijk
    Lead Global Audience Strategist

  • Katie Haggard
    Campaign Specialist

  • Moska Shaver
    Senior Email Campaign Specialist

  • Peter Coombe
    Lead Developer

  • Sadok Cervantes
    UX Design Contractor

  • Thea Skaff
    Senior Manager, Global Fundraising Campaigns

  • Haley Nordeen
    Banner Production Associate

  • Camille de Nes
    Lead Global Campaigns Strategist

  • Noah Israel
    Senior Email Campaign Specialist

Foundations & Major Gifts

  • Caitlin Virtue
    Senior Director of Development

  • Jerry Kim
    Senior Events Projects Manager

  • Jonathan Curiel
    Senior Development Comms Manager

  • Nora Nichols
    Development Data Associate

  • Rosie Lewis
    Development Analyst

  • Enloe Wilson
    Principal Major Gifts Development Manager

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

  • Rakhi Kumar
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Kristine Hancock
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Amber Johnson
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Runjini Murthy
    Fundraising Analyst

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

For 2021 (Q1)

  • Japan banners 13th of July - 10th of August
  • Japan emails 1st - 30th of July
  • France emails 27th of July - 1st of September
  • France banners 5th of October - 2nd of November

Germany[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Deutschland

  • Fundraising testing:
  • Fundraising Banners:

Switzerland[edit]

Operated by Wikimedia Switzerland

  • Fundraising Banner Testing:
  • Fundraising Banner Fundraising:

Contact Us

Fundraising updates

2020/2021 Q3 Update[edit]

I am happy to welcome Julia Brungs as the new Senior Community Relations Specialist. Julia is based in Helsinki, Finland and will engage with the communities representing the Advancement teams. Julia joins us from Creative Commons and has previously worked at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, and Europeana. You can reach her at jbrungs[at]wikimedia.org or her meta talk page. This means we had to say goodbye to Joseph Seddon who has been a great champion for the community in the Advancement team for the past 6 years. But he didn’t go far! Seddon has moved internally to a new position in the Product Department. Thank you, Seddon, for all your hard work and collaboration over the years. Congratulations on the next step in your Wikimedia career!

I’ll hand off to Julia for her first quarterly update from the fundraising teams. Welcome, Julia! MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 10:20, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Now, some highlights of our work in Q3! We successfully ran fundraising campaigns in both Sweden and Italy! The feedback from the communities was positive and we exceeded our fundraising goals which will help us to further the work of our global community. We are now working on the campaigns in Latin America and India which are scheduled for Q4.

We also have news on the Endowment. As a reminder, the Endowment was created five years ago as a permanent safekeeping fund to enable us to fulfill the part of our mission that says we will provide support to the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. Our goal was to raise an initial USD $100 million for the Endowment by 2026, after which income earned from investing the fund would become a new stream of financial support for Wikimedia projects. Thanks to the incredible generosity of our supporters and the hard work of the staff and the Endowment Board, the Endowment now holds $91.6 million. We anticipate that we will surpass the $100 million goal next fiscal year.

At the outset, the Endowment was established as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation, with the plan to move it to a permanent structure as the fund neared critical mass. In preparation for the approaching $100 million milestone, we are now beginning the work of taking the Endowment to its next stage of maturity: establishing it as an independent public charity with the mission of providing financial support for the Wikimedia projects. In Q3, a resolution to transition the Endowment to a new 501c3 was included in the WMF board resolution as well as the Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board. All reviews confirmed that moving forward to set up a stand-alone entity is still the best path forward and we are now working towards this. More information on this as it emerges. --JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:21, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

2020/2021 Q2 Update[edit]

Since the launch of the Wikimedia Endowment, we’ve helped support it in part with contributions from our annual fundraising campaigns. For this year again we will be using some of our banner fundraising efforts being directed towards the Wikimedia Endowment. Banners on the Wikipedia portal and wikipedia app, along with major gifts fundraising, will remain focused on raising for the annual plan budget. The purpose of the Endowment is to act as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to ensure a base level of support for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. Once the Endowment reaches it's initial goal, it will provide revenue to support the projects of Wikimedia. It will not fully fund the movement's work, so it is not a replacement for annual fundraising, but it will supplement it in the future.

Fundraising banners will most likely come down over Christmas with a final push in the run up to New Years Eve. This year, our usual thank you campaign will instead be used to focus on Wikipedia's 20th Birthday celebrations for a few days in January. If you are looking to run an event, this is a reminder to finalize your Rapid Grant application for Wikipedia 20 by 23:59 UTC 15 December 2020.

Earlier this week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new collaboration with Plant Your Change to support the planting of 400,000 trees. For every donation of US$1 or more made to the Wikimedia Foundation during this collaboration, Plant Your Change — an initiative to plant at least 100 million trees in the next decade — will plant a tree to protect the environment. This is part of the Wikimedia Foundation's work to become more environmentally sustainable and conscious of our environmental impact while we work to make free knowledge available to every human being. You can read the Wikimedia Foundation's annual sustainability statement, which chronicles the total annual carbon footprint of our work and informs recommendations to meaningfully reduce future carbon impacts. You can read more about the movements broader work with volunteer-led efforts, including the Wikimedia Sustainability Initiative aimed at reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia projects.

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.

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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