On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 3:22 PM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/9/17 Michael Peel <em...@mikepeel.net>: > >> This doesn't seem quite right to me. "average" donors may financially >> be worth less in each donation, but remember that there's a lot more >> of them, and they're more likely to give repeat donations. Also, >> there's more to "worth" than just financial, e.g. in good will / >> spreading the word. > > > It's generally a sort of power-law graph, like so many things are. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law > > They're all worth chasing at all levels.
In Wikimedia's past public fund raising campaigns (i.e. the things with banner messages shown to the public) one usually sees about 80% of the total income come in amounts of $100 or less. On the other hand, most of WMF's really large grants and donors have come from direct solicitations that are not part of the public campaigns. I would assume that Rand et al. see the $500 to $10k bracket as a target of opportunity precisely because it has been undercultivated in the past. It is a large enough number that such donations are rarely made during the public campaigns (and make up only a small fraction of the campaign totals), and yet at the same time it is too small to have gotten the same level of attention that might go into soliciting a major foundation for $100k+ grant. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
