Fundraising 2011/Chapter Materials/Wrap-up WMFR

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Hi,

WMFR just removed the thank-you banner, so the 2011-2012 fundraiser is now over in France.

The fundraiser started for logged-in on the 8th of November and ended yesterday (9/1/12). We've received approximatively 1024000 € from nearly 38000 donors. The sum is a 93% increase from last fundraiser and the number of donors increased 3 times. So big success there.

Our main sources of income during the fundraiser are

  • on-line donation (92.8%),
  • checks (6.2%), and
  • wire transfers (0.8%).

We had a steady stream of membership applications throughout the FR (roughly 120 new membership requests). Wikimédia France has now more than 370 members.

The success of the fundraiser allowed us to test the limits of our procedures and infrastructure. Despite the steep increase we were still able to answer donors' questions within the day (well, for weekdays at least). Some questions led to extensive research and really helped improve our expertise in tricky fiscal matters. Donors were also thanked fast.

We ran several appeals (6) from French Wikimedians (mostly Wikipedians, but also one appeal on Commons and one on Wikinews). The donors' response to the banners was a mixed bag we're still analyzing. It seems that donors favored senior citizens to younger people and people with fancy titles (founder, president) to "user/writer". But this is not the whole story: donors donate less often to young people but the average amount of the donation is higher. Then again, this is not the whole picture. We hope you crave to read our final report :)

We also ran some localized versions of the appeals since French is not the only language spoken in France. We A/B tested wording of the some appeals. We've also tested some graphical aspects in the banners/landing page/donation form. We've broadened and improved programs to cultivate big donors. We also modified the amounts that were proposed to the donors according to the distribution of donations. There will be a larger and more thorough report on the tests we conducted and the data we gathered throughout the FR.

The distribution of donations from projects is:

  • 5 €: 3.4% of the donations
  • 10 €: 45.9%
  • 15 €: 2.3%
  • 20 €: 4.7%
  • 30 €: 26.7%
  • 50 €: 10.6%
  • 100 € and above: 4.6%

It most probably doesnt add up to 100% but these are the most given amount. Besides the distribution varies a great deal between weekdays and week-ends, between early December and the last week of December, between banners and so on.

We noticed that the average donation from Wikimédia France websites was way above the average donation from banners and landing pages (43.7 € vs 25.8 €, truncated average: 35.97 € vs 24.8 €).

On average, 58% of online donors asked for a tax receipt. But it pretty much depends on the amount of the donation:

  • 39.6% of donors with a donation ≤ 15 € want a receipt,
  • 75.1% for donations between 15 and 50 € want a receipt
  • and 86% for donations above 50€.

By default, the set-up is "no tax receipt" so these 58% explicitely chose to get a receipt.

Oh, hmmm, wanting to read that final report eh?

A blogpost will be live (in French) tomorrow on Wikimédia France's blog: http://blog.wikimedia.fr

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the people involved in this fundraiser's success: folks at WMF, and the other teams from chapters (it was great to share information with Till and Tobias on IRC).

Yours,

Julien, for WMFR fundraising team.

PS: one funny stat I like: 20% of our donors gave a gmail address.

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