Zack, Thanks for the detailed email. It was very interesting email and
I appreciate that you took the time to write it. Good work!
I still hope to see information from Chapters about the amount collected
till now, to help us see the full picture of the fundraising this year.
Itzik
On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Zack Exley zex...@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Itzik -
I can give a short update -- and there will be more details in the
fundraising report after the campaign.
The banners from last year with the faces of editors, staff or Jimmy and
Please read a personal appeal from... stopped working between last year
and this year. We tried very hard to figure out why, but I still can't say
exactly why. It could be a mix of underlying issues that are pulling down
performance of any kind of banner and the fact that everyone on the
internet knows exactly what's in that personal appeal now and are no
longer curious enough to click.
What saved us was taking text from the personal appeals and putting it into
the banner itself. These banners did very well. These new message-driven
banners are what made us split the campaign in two -- because we knew we
were going to develop a lot of new messages and not have time to translate
them well. The campaign that started on the 27th of November ran only in
five countries: Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United
States.
At first, we had a short version of the new banner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=B12_1123_Smallinfo_fix
We could have run that for 46 days (the length of last year's campaign) and
probably made our goal. But it performed better the more information we put
into it. Through a series of tests we became confident that, while greater
banner height improved performance, that wasn't as big a factor as the
additional information we put into the banner. We tested many new versions
of messages in the banners and found many improvements. It looked like we
might be able to have a 25 day-long fundraiser.
We launched on the 27th. A few days into the campaign, we were still
paranoid about the goal. We were afraid that maybe the new banners would
burn out faster than the old ones did. Maybe they were good at getting
donations faster, but maybe we were not increasing the overall pool of
donors. We were constantly testing to boost performance. Out of curiosity,
we tested making the banners stick to the top of the screen while the page
scrolled. We knew that would be a dramatic step in a more annoying
direction, but like I said, we were still worried about the goal and just
wanted to know what our options were. The sticky banners did about 30%
better for donations. So we decided to keep them and see if we could get
the campaign done with in a very short time.
After 8 days of having the banners up, we were able take banners down and
only display them to people who had not seen them before (or rather,
browsers and computers that had not seen them before). We've never been
able to do this before and only had this feature fully developed several
days into the campaign. Since we took banners down for everyone, we've
mostly been displaying them only 1 or 2 times to people who've never seen
them. Though yesterday we pushed that up to 10 because we're hoping to
reach our US$25 million goal in the next few days.
We also made the banners stop sticking after the first 8 days, and
hopefully we'll never feel we have to use sticky banners again. In total,
we had sticky banners up for 4 or 5 days.
We hope that next week we'll be able to start a sort of Thank you
campaign. We will feature a thank you message, a video of Wikimedia
editors talking about their experience, interviews and written messages
from editors collected at Wikimania, and an invitation to all our readers
to become editors. The purpose of this campaign is mainly to raise
awareness among readers about how Wikimedia projects work and who is behind
them. The purpose is also to take time to explicitly thank donors for
helping us reach our goal so quickly this year. Thanking is a very
important part of fundraising -- but we've always been so eager to take
down banners that we've never taken enough time to thank donors in the
past. This year we feel its ok since almost no one saw banners for more
than 8 days.
I know there will probably be a lot of detailed questions about income from
different countries, comparisons to last year, to the chapters, etc... We
can't answer those now because we're too busy trying to wrap up the
campaign -- and also because a lot of transactions take time to settle.
Checks flow in slowly. And accurate comparisons take time to prepare. We
don't have truly accurate numbers until later in January.
But the basic result we have is that all 5 countries we ran banners saw a
huge increase in donations per banner impression from last year. I can
also say that in our Nov 15th 24-hour dress rehearsal in
