July 8, 2011 Steven Walling Appeal Test[edit]

In our latest test, we put a new appeal from Steven Walling up against Jimmy's founder appeal. Steven is currently on staff at the Wikimedia Foundation but he is also a long time contributor. We wanted to isolate the effect of his title, so we ran his same appeal text from two different banners, one calling him a “staffer” and the other calling him an “author.”

Results

Steven’s “staffer” appeal performed at nearly the same level as Jimmy’s appeal.
Steven’s “author” appeal brought in about 20% as many donations as Jimmy’s appeal.
Steven's "author" appeal had lower click rate and donation rate than the "staffer" appeal.
The appeal text was the same, the only difference being Steven’s title.

This test is encouraging because we've found another Wikipedian's story to tell that performs similar to Jimmy's appeal. We still need to do some work to test new variations of his title.

Next steps

We’re coming up with new titles to test for editor appeals. During the 2010 campaign, we tested Wikipedia “editor,” “author,” “contributor,” and “volunteer,” with “author” coming out ahead.
We're in the process of interviewing editors to gather a variety of personal Wikipedia stories that can be tested as fundraising appeals.

Reports