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Welcome to the Fundraising team's talk page - content from 2022-2024 has moved to archive 8

The content has been moved to Archive 8. Please ask questions or start constructive discussions around the WMF’s fundraising on this talk page. If you would like to help with our translation and localisation efforts please ping me and I will get you on touch with the team. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 13:37, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Proposed changes to fundraising banner tests

Dear all,

We would like to share with you our thoughts on running limited fundraising banner tests on English Wikipedia for non-logged-in readers, all year around.

Current situation:

Between July and December, we conduct banner tests on English Wikipedia for technical stability, payments, design, content, and other aspects, leading up to the End of Year “Big English” fundraising drive. These tests are limited in both their duration and percentage of readers who see them.  

As our fundraising program has evolved, we’ve realized that this timeframe provides limited opportunity for more in-depth testing, particularly on the technical and payments side of things, where our back-end development work is a constant and complex process. We can’t control the roadmaps of global banks and payment providers, which makes it even more important to align our testing with our own development cycles.

Starting January 2026:

To ensure we gather sufficient data for informed decisions to enable year-round optimization, especially regarding payments and technical systems, we would like to run limited banner tests on English Wikipedia during the full calendar year. This will help us to choose the right systems and features and make the donation experience smooth for our donors.

Recognizing that this shift may impact the on-wiki experience for some, we remain committed to not increasing fundraising banner impressions for non-logged in readers. Non-logged-in readers will see no more than 12 fundraising banner impressions during the testing phase of the year (January to November) on a single browser/device.

Please leave any comments you have below. Thank you, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 10:04, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi JBrungs. In what ways do the "roadmaps of global banks and payment providers" affect this issue? What are the limits on duration and percentage of readers who see them? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 14:05, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

What % of readers typically see a banner in a "limited" test? Ganesha811 (talk) 18:05, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

Reading between the lines, any frequent reader will see 12 so-called “test” banners on each browser/device they use, plus an unlimited number in December. That’s been my experience. 98.97.11.52 23:53, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

What steps will you take to obtain the informed consent of your test subjects? 38.121.127.246 04:07, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

How often will people hit this 12 banner limit? How is it tracked? In any case, people already feel we ask for money too often. Extending this to year-round would only make that impression worse, whether or not the times they see the banner remain the same. ARandomName123 (talk) 02:41, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi,

A reader will see 12 banners on any device/browser between January and November. We use CentralNotice’s built-in impression diet feature to set a max number of impressions. It is difficult to say when readers will hit this limit as it depends on their reading behaviour. Generally, banners will not be shown all the time on Wikipedia between January and November but only for short test windows throughout these months. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 15:45, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Just clarifying: is the current limit 12 banners between July and December? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 15:49, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Yes. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, quick clarification. The current limit is 12 impressions per device/browser between July and November. A non logged in reader will then see banners again (if they have reached their banner impression limit) when the full fundraising campaign starts in December. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi,

Unlike many nonprofits, we manage our own donation platform, donate.wikimedia.org, rather than relying on third party options. This gives us a lot more control to protect donor privacy, and helps us secure the most cost-effective processing rates. But it also means we take on additional work maintaining our own platform integrations with all the payment providers and banks we support around the world. This is full-time work, and has gotten more complex as we offer new methods, new donation types, and more markets. Payment providers and banks often update their systems on their own timelines—this could include changes to APIs, new security requirements, or the deprecation of older systems. Having the room to run banner tests year-round will help us ensure that the majority of donors in our big campaigns have the smoothest experience possible.

Regarding limits: during the testing phases (January–November), banners are shown to only a small percentage of non-logged-in readers for a limited period, for example 5% of English Wikipedia readers in the U.S. for 3 hours. We may run a longer test if, for example, we are testing adding a new donation method that needs more impressions to get enough transactions. We also cap impressions so that a non-logged-in reader will see a maximum of 12 banner views during this period on a given browser/device. We reset these parameters for the December campaign.

Hope this helps clarify, and happy to answer further!

Best, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

How much revenue was collected from “test” fundraising in 2024? By how much is that expected to increase with these changes? 98.97.11.52 20:02, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

The number of donations and total revenue we earn from any given testing window varies widely based on length of testing, % of traffic limiting, and what we are testing. Some tests generate a few thousand dollars in revenue, whereas there are others where the figure is higher. All revenue collected in pre-tests contributes to our annual goal for that region, and is reported in our annual Fundraising Report. JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 14:42, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Payment methods are too exclusively American

I live in Belgium. I recently organised a small fundraiser at work and wanted to transfer the profits to the Foundation. I encountered the following difficulties.

1. As a European I was attracted by a possibility labeled SEPA because it carries the implicit promise of a cost-free transfer. Tried this multiple times, always hitting an error message.
2. I then tried to use my credit card but hit an error message again (yes, I checked the limits). Exasperated I wrote to the helpdesk, stating that I did not trust PayPal and how could I get rid of my money as easily as possible?
3. The help desk replied that the transfer by credit card had been made! Which is nice and worrying at the same time. If I get an error message on a payment I would expect the payment to have failed. I might even try again multiple times.
4. The donation page also contains a possibility to transfer to a UK bank account. However, since the UK is no longer in the EU (and they never adopted the Euro in the first place), this does not offer the promise of a cost-free transfer.

What is stopping the Foundation from opening an account in an EU Member State that uses the Euro? One of them even has English as a national language. It would save a lot of money on transfer costs. More importantly, it avoids technology that generates error messages, thereby increasing trust from potential benefactors. No mandates, no blank cheques, no sharks: just publish an IBAN account number with the corresponding BIC code and presto. What am I missing here?

Lieven Smits (talk) 13:26, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Lieven Smits,

Thank you so much for your support of the Wikimedia Foundation, and for organizing a fundraiser on our behalf — we’re truly grateful. We’re also very sorry for the difficulties you encountered while trying to complete your donation, and we appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with us.

While we’re not able to offer a solution at this time, your input highlights the importance of continually reviewing our infrastructure and exploring ways to make the donation process more seamless for supporters around the world.

In the meantime, if you or others ever need assistance, our donor relations team is here to help. You can always reach them directly at donate@wikimedia.org, where they are happy to help you further and collect thoughtful feedback like yours to help guide future improvements.

Best, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 05:58, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, JBrungs. We're all doing the best we can :-)

Apart from continuous infrastructure improvements, would you give consideration to my proposal that you open an Irish bank account? According to the Fundraising/2023-24 Report the Foundation received $49,423,340.29 from Europe - which admittedly is not the same as the Eurozone, but that's still hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank fees we could save every year. Lieven Smits (talk) 09:38, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Lieven Smits,

Thank you for your suggestion. I have passed this on to the team but we currently do not have plans to open an account in the Eurozone. For now, we offer the SEPA payment option for our EU donors. I am sorry that you ran into issues with this method and I hope this won't be the case again in the future. Thank you again for your donation and your thoughtful feedback. Best, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 06:51, 18 June 2025 (UTC)