August 5th, Steven Walling Test

Great news! We’ve found our first volunteer appeal to perform on a similar level with our founder appeal. The fundraising team has been testing 2011 fundraising messages for about two months now. We’ve found successful programmer and staff appeals but this is the first editor appeal we have seen perform anywhere near the other appeals.

We tested new banner text with an appeal from long time editor, Steven Walling. Up until now, our best volunteer banner text had been, “Please read: a personal appeal from Wikipedia author Steven Walling.” In this test we tried, “Please read: a personal appeal from an author of 191 Wikipedia articles.” Steven’s volunteer appeal included a new comparison with the other top websites’ number of servers and employees where he said, "Wikipedia, the #5 site on the web, serves 411 million people per month -- with 370 servers and 73 employees."

Key Findings

The new banner had about a 20% higher click rate than the Jimmy banner and overall Steven's appeal performed pretty close to Jimmy’s donation level.
The clear and direct appeal that emphasizes Wikipedia's utility and efficiency was effective in Steven's editor appeal.

Author of 191 Articles

File:Jimmyvssteven191.png

Jimmy Wales Banner

Next Steps

The results from this test are really encouraging. The Storytellers have just returned from Wikimania. While at Wikimedia’s annual conference, we interviewed over 40 editors from around the world with different Wikipedia experiences and stories. Right now we’re in the process of sorting through this mountain of material to start writing fundraising appeals to test. The successful test with Steven’s author appeal is really motivating to find more successful appeals from different editors. We’ll find plenty of new things that work and other things that won’t work, but this year we want the fundraiser to rely as much as possible on voices of many different members of our community.

You didn’t have to attend Wikimania to get involved. We will be interviewing people from all different areas of the world over the next several months. If you're interested in sharing your story and explaining in your own words why donating is important, please send a message to wikistorywikimedia.org.

Raw statistics

title	impressions	views	donations	amount	amount50	avg_donation	avg_donation50	click_rate	don_per_imp	amt_per_imp	amt50_per_imp	don_per_view	amt_per_view	amt50_per_view
Jimmy	1170738	15890	327	6238.54	5338.54	n/a	n/a	0.013777	0.000274	0.005221	0.004477	0.020400	0.389744	0.333350
Walling (Plain)	1171567	15577	249	6441.00	5041.00	n/a	n/a	0.013478	0.000207	0.005345	0.004191	0.015740	0.408168	0.318220
Walling (191 articles)	1171721	19286	262	5863.00	5188.00	n/a	n/a	0.016704	0.000218	0.004874	0.004310	0.013430	0.300300	0.265530

Full report: File:C JMvSW2 0805 US.pdf