Talk:Fundraising/Archive 2

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Concerns about Fundraising, Excess Cash, and Project Spending

While this is an old article I wonder if a similar could be written today and what the response to it would be. Money obviously has a direct and indirect influence on the project and staff. I think it would be wise to have an article, perhaps linked from the Fundraising page which cleared up things a bit. IMO as much as possible the fundraising should be limited to raise what is needed for hardware operations (i.e. items we cannot secure for free with voluntary work). Software should be developed by volunteers and research conducted the same way. Otherwise a picture of corruption might start to form which could incredibly damage the entire project.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/

This page (and similar, I suppose) are still target of vandals. Where do they come from? What purpose do these pages serve? --Nemo 12:42, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up Nemo, I'd forgotten those pages. As the name suggests, they are from the 2010 Fundraiser, when all the banners were submitted by the community. We no longer do that, so I've closed up the input forms to prevent vandalism. (Suggestions for banners are of course still welcome here if anyone has ideas!) Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 10:47, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Cost of the sidebar sitesupport

800 Wikimedia wikis have in their MediaWiki:Sidebar a sitesupport-url link pointing to Special:FundraiserRedirector (e.g. [1]), 365/365 days a year. How much income does this generate?

I ask because, as we spends tens of millions dollars to optimise user experience, it's important that at the same time we ask ourselves what the cost is of using such precious interface real estate, and whether the benefits overcome it. --Nemo 05:26, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Good question, people do in fact donate via those links. I pulled a quick breakdown of new donations from each major source for the 2013-14 fiscal year, and we raised just over $2.2 million from sidebar links.
medium donations total amount (USD) notes
sitenotice 2,091,431 28,191,937.41 CentralNotice banners
email 166,654 4,625,574.22 emails to past donors
sidebar 75,738 2,234,307.89 project sidebar links
spontaneous 20,150 932,587.19 reached donate.wikimedia.org without any tracking info
wmfWikiRedirect 2,797 88,746.93 old fundraising pages on wikimediafoundation.org
SocialMedia 1,984 29,512.93 via a shared link (e.g. from wmf:Thank You/en)
-- Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 13:57, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Thank you a lot, that's very interesting. Do you by any chance have a possibility to do a rough breakdown by project? I ask because we might discover that in some projects the income/impressions ratio is significantly lower. --Nemo 07:13, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

I've put the top 30 below. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 11:56, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Sidebar donations by project (July 2013-July 2014)
project donations total amount (USD)
en.wikipedia.org 57909 1842585.66
ru.wikipedia.org 2994 31411.95
it.wikipedia.org 2502 46622.75
es.wikipedia.org 2282 38473.52
fr.wikipedia.org 1705 87048.87
ja.wikipedia.org 1185 30376.95
nl.wikipedia.org 1046 30319.07
sv.wikipedia.org 750 20727.11
zh.wikipedia.org 744 10453.67
de.wikipedia.org 711 22325.11
cs.wikipedia.org 520 8227.38
pl.wikipedia.org 440 5277.53
tr.wikipedia.org 291 3328.85
fi.wikipedia.org 265 5113.98
ko.wikipedia.org 227 4497.19
he.wikipedia.org 158 3295.18
hu.wikipedia.org 145 1659.28
commons.wikimedia.org 126 6158.12
ca.wikipedia.org 112 3185.70
uk.wikipedia.org 90 1341.68
da.wikipedia.org 74 2111.77
th.wikipedia.org 67 449.20
no.wikipedia.org 56 1576.54
simple.wikipedia.org 51 1442.02
en.wiktionary.org 47 1480.45
en.wikibooks.org 43 1079.50
ro.wikipedia.org 38 667.72
ar.wikipedia.org 31 426.04
en.wikiquote.org 29 638.30
bg.wikipedia.org 25 301.33

Donating loses current page

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T60506

There's a thread at Wikimedia_Forum#Donating_loses_current_page., which I'll copy here:

I was reading a Wikipedia page and the banner at the top suggested I donate, so I did. The donation process closed (or opened over) the Wikipedia page that I had been reading. -_- I don't mind taking a little time aside to donate some money - Wikipedia is awesome. But once I've done so, I'd like what I was reading before to still be there, please. Can the donation thing be made to launch in a new window/tab? Thanks. --124.171.139.99 23:01, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:52, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Pop-ups

For the record: a discussion about French WP users' unanimous vote against the pop-ups used in November has taken place on Grind24's talk page. Oliv0 (talk) 11:40, 2 December 2014‎ (UTC)

Hi, please see Lila's post to wikimedia-l. We will not be using a pop-up banner in upcoming campaigns. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 16:51, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
In-page pop-ups (layer ads) are currently showing on mobile (reproduced in an incognito tab on enwiki from a Swiss IP a few minutes ago). After I have to close a popup to get to the content I want to see, a yellow donation banner continues to be displayed at the bottom on following page views. When I first encountered it recently, I have seen content-overlaying donation ads multiple times when navigating using the back button. (This was on a mobile connection and I was unable to reproduce this now.) In this case, the ads had the opposite of the intended effect - I had already planned my donations for this year, but the Wikipedia donation is now going elsewhere. By the way, it's quite ironic to shove the words "ad-free" in my face in a highly disruptive layer ad. (Anonymous, 08:55, 4 December 2014 (UTC))

«On December 2, 2014, Giving Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its year-end contribution campaign on English Wikipedia». Really? I've been seeing banners on en.wiki all the time in the last many months. Is this about USA, UK etc.? --Nemo 20:33, 2 December 2014 (UTC)

WMF often does some trials ahead of time. And you are their target demographic! Rich Farmbrough 13:35 5 December 2014 (GMT).
Nothing is a trial, everything is a campaign to raise funds, ongoing year-long. See Fundraising. --Nemo 15:23, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Fundraising principles

(drawing from a wm-l thread)

Let's revisit our fundraising principles and see how we are realizing them in our campaigns. We've done a fine job of optimizing traditional banner measure: conversion rates for messages seen by visitors. Are we making it easy for people to spread the message? collaborating with local groups to send effective and compelling and informative messages? reminding people that our work is founded in contributions of knowledge? What are our messages communicating, beyond an ask for contribution: distress? danger? encouragement? hope? stability? bright future? How can we assess this message quality, how does it fit into the larger narrative we are committed to? 76.119.234.190 20:50, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Scope

Does the banner only appear at Wikipedia or also at sister projects? Have not seen it there... Gryllida 03:05, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Only on Wikipedia projects at the moment. Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 18:29, 8 December 2014 (UTC)