Talk:Fundraising 2010/Feedback

Thank you for coming to share your thoughts and comments on our annual fundraising appeal message.

Donate now

Fundrasing

All in all the message is good (made me donate again), but maybe a better strategy would be to "scare" people. If people would understand that without their donation there will be no Wikimedia, they will reach out and act.

Will consider donating again and revert. I assume Wikipedia genuinely needs the funs for operations or improvimenet, I would suggest it would not be unfair to make available financial data on the cost of running Wikipedia and in case there are surpluses raised how they are held in reserve or what is done with them. What the donations raised for would be used for is also not unreasonable to disclose. Some form of financial statement on the trusts historical accounts - sources of funds, capital/funds invested etc. would also be helpful.

Sincerely

Roland Janssens

Simpler URL

I have donated to Wikipedia occasionally, but as I'm trying to convince other people to do it too, I need to be able to pass a simple URL to a donation page to them. Here's the link to this year's personal appeal from Jimmy Wales: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:LandingCheck?landing_page=WMFJA1&language=en&country=RO&utm_source=2010_JA1_Banner2_button_EN1&utm_medium=sitenotice&utm_campaign=20101115JA01 That's not friendly at all!

Not to mention that neither http://www.wikimedia.org/donate nor http://www.wikipedia.org/donate work anymore. Create a simple URL that can be forwarded, tweeted, IMed etc. It will spread much more easily.

Adrian

Hi Adrian, the reason the URLs are so long is to ensure that individuals are sent to the proper language landing page. Shorter options: donate.wikimedia.org and bit.ly/WPcontrib. Thanks for helping us spread the word! - Deniz (WMF) 22:56, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Good and altruistic text

Hi Jimmy I think that your fundraiser text contains an appeal to the most precious part of the human mind: Altruism. This is the part that makes me donate, - not fear. Thanks Niels Monberg

Possibility of regular donation

I wonder whether a regular cash flow would be of help in financing Wikipedia. I for one would be willing to have automatic deductions made say every three months. A category "Friends of Wikipedia" could be created, and all I would expect additional in return for this commitment would be an annual newsletter. Ian Keese, Victoria, Australia

Breakdown of expenditures

Hello Jimmy,

I have read your personal appeal, and I agree that wikipedia and the excellent work you and your sister sites do must be supported.

This leads me to ask: What does it take to keep wikipedia up and running? Specifically, I'd love to see a totally open breakdown that shows how much funding you've received and what your major expenses are. This information is priceless in what it could potentially teach others about the nitty gritty of running a site as massive as wikipedia. What is there to lose from sharing it openly?

I know that what I am asking for is definitely a "peek behind the curtain," but why not? If you trust the many millions of us to be your writers and editors, can you trust us all to also act as your accountant?

I hope the answer is yes.

Sincerely,

Jackson Nash thejacksonproject@me.com www.superforest.org

Thank you for your comment Mr. Nash, here you can download our 2008-2009 Foundation Annual Report and 2010-11 Annual plan, which contains our budget for the current fiscal year. - Deniz (WMF) 22:04, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Censorship on Wikipedia

Having donated in the past I was saddened to later find blatant cases of what can only be described as censorship on the Wikipedia website.

For this reason I will no longer be donating to Wikipedia.

Alan Kelly

Description of the need

I think Wikipedia is a great thing, and should be kept going. But my question is always, where does the money go? What is it spent on? Who decides how it's spent? I saw your answer on a comment above; and I know that legally if you accept donations you're required to do certain reporting. But I would think that even some simple statistics would help: "Our total yearly operating budget is $Q million, R% of which is spent directly on the costs of housing and running the website. Wikipedia's servers house X terabytes of information, and serve up Y gigabytes of data per day. Our monthly electricity bill alone is $Z dollars. We've been able to keep Wikipedia ad-free so far only because of the generous donations of people like you." And then somewhere else, "If you want a detailed accounting of where the money goes, you can look at our [annual report]."

My $0.02.

Not sure about the message, and I think it's bad timing

I think the message is only partly good and the time is bad. I perfectly understand the message about freedom and working together. I doubt many do. I am a teacher and I never ever heard a student comment on that point. To them Wikipedia is free (as a free beer) and that's it. I'd rather put forward to people who use Wikipedia on a regular basis that this service is free for them, but does have it's costs, and that on the long run using something and not paying for it means it will disappear.

As to the time of your message, there I think you are just plain wrong: you come asking for money just at the same time as everyone else, churches, nature saving funds, etc.., etc... Do you expect people to support Wikipedia because it's Christmas?

Now, I've never been a mainstream thinker, so perhaps I'm the only one to think that way. If Christmas time pays well, go on.

I'll continue to support Wikipedia because I use it, find it reliable and reasonably free in thinking (I don't know how far writers could go before they are stopped if they are not politicaly correct).

T. de Coulon

Well worth everones support

I feel that Wikipedia is the most valuable source of information on almost any subject you could think of and it comes without attitude or agenda, political, ethnic or religious. To be based on contribution of the users taking into account their willingness and ability to give support funds is quite refressing in this age. Well done and long may Wikipedia survive. SJH

No need to reiterate the need

To me Wikipedia is a useful tool that needs funding.

I don't need bleeding heart appeals and long summaries explaining the obvious need for funding.

Keep it simple by requesting a donation and having several easy tick boxes stating an amount from $1 - $xxxxx amount.

Those that use Wikipedia and feel compelled to donate will do so through an easy mechanism.

Add to that some clarity & transparancy on how the funds get used and I feel people will donate if they feel they can afford to do so.

Just my take on it.

Cheers,

JJ

Donación realizada

Gracias Jimmy por recordarnos que tenemos el potencial para hacer que las cosas sigan funcionando libres de anuncios. El correo es perfecto y me ha movido a donar un año más. Enhorabuena.

Noa Orizales

Donations

On first attempt, it seems that to make a donation in response to this e-mail you have to be resident in the United States. Clearly many of us Wikisupporters are not US.

Agree with several responders - I'm happy to donate something to help keep Wikipedia going, its an amazing resource. But - I also think an easily available financial summary of the operation should be posted, either when donations are requested or permanently on the homepage menu, and I found that being asked for "$50 or more" was a bit off-putting. Not sure why, quite possibly for reasons not particularly creditable, but that was my first gut reaction. It would be nice to have information such as "running costs...X dollars, number of hits/users or whatever, Y per year, so we would all have an inkling of how much our personal use of this 'Free' resource is costing somebody!

Gracias Wikipedia

Estoy contenta de poder colaborar con un proyecto tan importante para avanzar en el conocimiento y el saber compartido como es Wikipedia. Soy una usuaria asidua, casi diaria, y la Wiki me ha ayudado mucho a avanzar en el saber.. es muy divulgativa y difunde las ideas de manera sencilla.

Los temas de financiación siempre son complicados, yo prefiero que no hay publicidad en la página para que haya mayor independencia, aunque ya se sabe que el precio de la independencia siempre es alto. Espero y confío que con las contribuciones lo hagamos posible. En cuanto a la claridad de las finanzas, yo prefiero creer que sois responsables y coherentes con el inmenso caudal de confianza que os depositamos. Así lo pienso y espero.

Saludos, Maite

UK Payment

Hi, It seems not to be possible to pay from a non-US address. Careless.

Don't stare at your millions of users, as some might feel uncomfortable

In the banner, mr. Jimmy Wales stares at all wikipedia users. Some users feel uncomfortable with that. Perhaps a profile picture (Caesar style) would make a better case. Anyway, I'll be donating extra for this christmas period. Wikipedia is invaluable.

Cheers, Guillaume Riflet

Good idea!

Hi there,

Very briefly, as you're going to receive hundreds of thousands of these responses. I'm happy to donate to Wikipedia though really not $50 or more. I donated £10 last time and I'm happy to donate another £10 this time (I read the appeal the other day and was actually planning to donate on 22 Nov. I think £20 a year would be a maximum donation I would be willing to pay. I don't use Wikipedia that much at the moment, or if I do it is more out of curiosity and not extensively. If I used it for work-related purposes, I'd be happy to donate more (which I did some five years ago and then I donated more, as far as I remember).

Best regards, Adam

Financial transparency

Happy to donate, but I agree with others here that some transparency of the financial structure is needed. Harry.

Response

Dear Jim

Thanks for the note! Sure, I've contributed to Wiki and suffered a little too at the hands of officious administrators with agendas that would beffudle your average Spanish Inquisitor. Can't donate right now as I'm in the middle of a couple of projects and –Juliancolton |  refuses to reply let alone the precious Ty Strange, when we need money and are blocked or ignored...you should know you've had a long haul and it can't be easy dealing with that naughty Wikileaks affair - hopefully Assange is only guilty of gross naivety and not High Treason. Who care anyways? Pindar and the rest of the 33rd Peds should have known better; fortunately there are more powerful forces at work that have laid their plans a long time ago that will make even a modern day Ramses pale (no Berlusca) puns intended! Cheerio and good luck over Kiffins with the money trawl!Ernstblumberg 20:24, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Feedback on this year's campaign

I'm not sure this is the right place for this, but still:

I am a regular WP editor and have donated to the WM foundation in the past. However, I found this year's ad campaign overly intrusive. Jimmy's picture and the bold face message are quite distracting (nothing against him, I'm a big fan), and it's somewhat ironic to follow a big ad link to a letter which talks about Wikipedia without ads. Also, if the space currently used for these fund-raisers is actually used for commercial advertisements, it would generate more revenue right?

I will be donating this year as usual, but I think this campaign actually put off some of my friends from donating. Unless the WMF is in some kind of money-crisis, I would suggest we go back to small one-liner ads as in previous years.

Sincerely, SPat 07:34, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

viral fundraising

I suggest you look into redacting a simple powerful email for people to connect to a wikipedia contribution page - perhaps with some easter eggs to generate interest - the key being that it's user to user not top down.

Also you could create a "we support wikipedia" seal for small and medium businesses to put on their website once they've donated.

Best, Johan

"We'll never run ads, collect profits, or compromise our independence" : for this reason I'll continue to give some money to the foundation.

Use the same things you used last year

I think last year's donation appeal was much better. Main features:

- The donation appeal that appeared on every simple Wikipedia page showed the total amount of money donated, and the deadline. This encouraged me to donate more if I saw that your target wasn't being met.

- When I clicked on the appeal, I know I was one click or two clicks away from the page that showed how the money was going to be spent, and also what the organization was going to do in case of not enough money (what items were first to be cut)

- The images loaded much faster and appeared more friendly.

Use the same things you used last year

I think last year's donation appeal was much better. Main features:

• The donation appeal that appeared on every simple Wikipedia page showed the total amount of money donated, and the deadline. This encouraged me to donate more if I saw that your target wasn't being met.

• When I clicked on the appeal, I know I was one click or two clicks away from the page that showed how the money was going to be spent, and also what the organization was going to do in case of not enough money (what items were first to be cut)

• The images loaded much faster and appeared more friendly.