Hey All–
First and foremost, a big thank you to all our donors, community, and supporters for all the time & money given to this Annual Fundraiser. The Wikimedia Foundation would not exist without the support and goodwill of our community.
We have some more statistics and information to share with everyone about the great success of this year’s fundraiser.
As you all can see, our progress this year has been pretty darn good. Our “Jimmy Appeal” is working quite well, making $430,000 on its first full day up, and another $345,000 on the second. This picture (from WMF techie Trevor Parscal) probably shows it best: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:FundraiserStatistics-Blog.jpg. I hope to discuss that in a future blog post.
Secondly, a long awaited link: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionTrackingStatistics. This is part of the data that we use to evaluate site notice performance. You will see the number of donations, total donations, and largest gifts for our different site notices for each day. Eventually, we would like to put out all the data for all fundraising dates; however, due to processing limitations, we can only have one week of data available.
Landing pages names Support, Support2, and Appeal2 are different types of pre-payment pages. Sometimes we test different versions to compare results. For the current Jimmy Appeal, most donors are randomly shunted to either (Appeal ==> Support2) or (Appeal2). We are comparing those results for future campaigns. In the past, we also tested 5Facts and Change the World landing pages. PP = donations made via Paypal and CC = credit card payment through our new credit card gateway. You can also sort by column by clicking on the sort arrows.
Thirdly, I think I need to admit that I’ll never have a perfect understanding of how well any particular site notice will do. I can suspect that certain ones will do well, or certain ones will fail, but I’m constantly reminded that the donation data from our users never quite aligns with what I expect.
For instance, we developed a banner based on this donor quote:
“I couldn’t ignore that banner at the top of the site anymore… I use Wikipedia far too often to ignore the need!”
To me, it’s too long and a bit awkwardly phrased. I did not think it would hold up well to sweet, simple, short phrases we’ve tried in the past. I do acknowledge that it has some humor and poignancy behind it.
The results?
2009_Notice42 did incredibly well. “Crushing all in it’s path” (this is before the onset of the Jimmy Appeal) would be more accurate, but the message is drawing in a number of donors. Running at 20% of English page views with 5 other banners in rotation, the results are glaring:
| Date | % of Total | Site Notice | Payment | #Donations | Total | Average | Highest |
| WP views | Type | Pay Type | Amount | Gift | Donation | ||
| 12/9/09 | 20% | 2009_Notice18 | pp | 625 | $9,971.38 | $15.95 | $250.00 |
| 12/9/09 | cc | 443 | $10,585.42 | $23.89 | $1,000.00 | ||
| 12/9/09 | 20% | 2009_Notice22 | cc | 254 | $9,247.23 | $36.41 | $250.00 |
| 12/9/09 | pp | 251 | $4,871.59 | $19.41 | $114.72 | ||
| 12/9/09 | 10% | 2009_Notice30_bold | cc | 162 | $4,607.08 | $28.44 | $250.00 |
| 12/9/09 | pp | 161 | $3,224.05 | $20.03 | $100.00 | ||
| 12/9/09 | 20% | 2009_Notice40 | pp | 276 | $6,164.59 | $22.34 | $250.00 |
| 12/9/09 | cc | 196 | $6,061.62 | $30.93 | $365.25 | ||
| 12/9/09 | 10% | 2009_Notice41 | pp | 153 | $2,787.11 | $18.22 | $100.00 |
| 12/9/09 | cc | 83 | $3,054.72 | $36.80 | $250.00 | ||
| 12/9/09 | 20% | 2009_Notice42 | pp | 992 | $20,897.33 | $21.07 | $470.93 |
| 12/9/09 | cc | 875 | $24,067.96 | $27.51 | $2,000.00 |
Now, why do you think it’s working so well? Is it a combination of previous messages? What other messages do you think would work well?
-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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