Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[MZMcBride]

Zack Exley wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:
>>In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I
>>think you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some
>>choices about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of
>>banners) after evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to
>>readers and editors) versus their benefit (increase in donations,
>>decrease in fundraising banner time, etc.). I realize it's January and
>>that the next annual fundraiser is many months away, but do you have any
>>idea when this year you'll be having a discussion about these trade-offs
>>and where?
>>
> 
>Any suggestions about how that might best be done? There are so few people
>who participate on this list that I would say this isn't a good place to
>measure the feelings of either WM contributions or readers.

Meta-Wiki ().

I agree that this list is not representative of the Wikimedia community
(and no forum will ever be truly representative), but I don't think that's
important here.

>There's also the problem of people not necessarily knowing what actually
>annoys them or interferes with their experience the most when it's being
>discussed in the abstract.

I don't follow. There are about a million test wikis available, including
test.wikipedia.org, test2.wikipedia.org, and an entire Wikimedia Labs
cluster that can be used for testing banners. You're absolutely right that
discussing banners and annoyance in the abstract would be useless, I just
have no idea why anyone ever would. There are about eleven months till the
start of the next annual fundraiser. In that time, I think it should be
possible to come up with a few demos for the community to evaluate and
assess.

>And surveys of course have their problems.

I don't follow. This doesn't seem to have stopped the Wikimedia Foundation
or any other organization on Earth from (regularly) using surveys.

>Moreover, what are the important questions? What do some editors find
>objectionable from an aesthetic point of view? (Even though we are now
>sparing logged in users completely.) What gets in the way of readers' use
>of the site? Or other more nuanced questions about readers' reactions? For
>example, do some choices cause readers to perceive banners as ads, cause
>confusion or possibly reduce readership?

Well, are we sparing logged in users completely? Who determines that? Is
that documented anywhere?

There are many ways to annoy readers. Generally anything that invades the
content area of the site (which is physically marked on the page with
borders) is off-limits and inappropriate to me. Others may disagree,
particularly if there's enough of a financial gain. These are the types of
discussions that need to be had.

It's always possible to do a full splash-screen and it would probably
bring in a lot of money, but I don't think anyone is advocating for such
an approach. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is having no
banners at all and relying on simple word-of-mouth. The grey areas in
between these two extremes need further thought and consideration.
Meta-Wiki is the place for this.

>Any thoughts?

Your questions are a bit silly. :-)

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 8:26 PM, Zack Exley  wrote:
> I'm very sorry I didn't answer this question earlier...

Thanks for the response! I thought that I'd get it, so I was mostly patient :)

> The short answer is: credit goes to a new kind of banner that put several
> powerful sentences (powerful for getting donations) directly into the
> banner. The text in the banner included several of the ideas from the
> appeals that used to be on our landing pages, plus some new ideas. There
> were a few other design changes that increased the donations too.
> ...

I am happy to hear both: that the success is the product of
professional work and that the cause for it is known :)

I'd also like to personally thank to the fundraising team. Gloomy
perspective of Wikimedia funding was inside of the top of my first
world problems (although I was consoled by the fact that I am living
in the first world, finally). Everything looks better now :)

Off topic: It is really bizarre to realize that the funding of the
biggest encyclopedia in the history of humans depends on design of
banners. Without the context of the Internet Era, it's almost
comparable to the connection between animist rituals and good harvest.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Thomas Dalton]

On Jan 7, 2013 2:08 AM, "James Salsman"  wrote:
>
> > We do know that this year the decay of fundraising from day to day was
> > steeper than in past years, confirming that we were eating into out
> > existing donor pool faster than before.
>
> On the contrary, December 3rd was a stronger day than December 2nd,
> with a much smaller maximum donation.

One outlier does not disprove anything. There are far too many factors
involved to be able to expect everything to follow some perfect pattern.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[James Salsman]

> We do know that this year the decay of fundraising from day to day was
> steeper than in past years, confirming that we were eating into out
> existing donor pool faster than before.

On the contrary, December 3rd was a stronger day than December 2nd,
with a much smaller maximum donation. All previous years when the
totals leveled out like that they stayed level +/- 20% for weeks.

I'm trying to sort out why the stated expectations were so much lower
than the prior measurements off-list.

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Zack Exley]

On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:59 PM, MZMcBride  wrote:

> Zack Exley wrote:
> > In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making
> > $150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did
> > everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't
> littering
> > the sites with banners for little return.
>
> Thank you for the very detailed reply. I'm highlighting just this paragraph
> to say thank you to the fundraising team again for all of its work to
> reduce
> the time the banners spend on the site. This is fantastic. :-)
>
> In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I think
> you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some choices
> about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of banners) after
> evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to readers and editors)
> versus their benefit (increase in donations, decrease in fundraising banner
> time, etc.). I realize it's January and that the next annual fundraiser is
> many months away, but do you have any idea when this year you'll be having
> a
> discussion about these trade-offs and where?
>

Any suggestions about how that might best be done? There are so few people
who participate on this list that I would say this isn't a good place to
measure the feelings of either WM contributions or readers.

There's also the problem of people not necessarily knowing what actually
annoys them or interferes with their experience the most when it's being
discussed in the abstract.

And surveys of course have their problems.

Moreover, what are the important questions? What do some editors find
objectionable from an aesthetic point of view? (Even though we are now
sparing logged in users completely.) What gets in the way of readers' use
of the site? Or other more nuanced questions about readers' reactions? For
example, do some choices cause readers to perceive banners as ads, cause
confusion or possibly reduce readership?

Any thoughts?




>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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-- 
Zack Exley
Chief Revenue Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[MZMcBride]

Zack Exley wrote:
> In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making
> $150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did
> everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't littering
> the sites with banners for little return.

Thank you for the very detailed reply. I'm highlighting just this paragraph
to say thank you to the fundraising team again for all of its work to reduce
the time the banners spend on the site. This is fantastic. :-)

In previous discussions, there were questions about trade-offs and I think
you mentioned that the Wikimedia community would have to make some choices
about certain implementation details (e.g., "stickiness" of banners) after
evaluating the cost of these features (annoyance to readers and editors)
versus their benefit (increase in donations, decrease in fundraising banner
time, etc.). I realize it's January and that the next annual fundraiser is
many months away, but do you have any idea when this year you'll be having a
discussion about these trade-offs and where?

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Zack Exley]

Milos -

I'm very sorry I didn't answer this question earlier...


On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 1:51 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:

> I read the official blog [1] about it, but it doesn't have rationale.
> And I am too lazy to analyze it.
>
> So, may someone give us the reasons why this fundraising finished so
> quickly.
>
>
The short answer is: credit goes to a new kind of banner that put several
powerful sentences (powerful for getting donations) directly into the
banner. The text in the banner included several of the ideas from the
appeals that used to be on our landing pages, plus some new ideas. There
were a few other design changes that increased the donations too.

All these changes seem obvious in hindsight. But it took a lot of testing
to get there. You can see some of the tests we did on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Breakthrough

One thing that helped a lot was finding some new designers who were willing
to do very plain and simple designs and work with us to make very subtle
modifications to them week after week. For some reason it was very hard to
find designers willing to do that kind of unglamorous work.


> I have to say that I'm very positively surprised by this fact, as I
> was much more pessimistic in relation to the future fundraising.
>
> The main question -- which could be just guessed if we have accurate
> rationale for this fundraising record -- is how sustainable is the
> growth (or even the stagnation with this amount of money)?
>

There is room for confusion here. Just because we dramatically shortened
the campaign doesn't mean we can dramatically increase the money we raise.
As our banners get more effective, part of what happens is that we just get
the same pool of donors to donate faster. But better banners do also
increase the total pool of donors too.

We do know that this year the decay of fundraising from day to day was
steeper than in past years, confirming that we were eating into out
existing donor pool faster than before.

In past years, the campaign has dragged on for weeks with us only making
$150,000 per day. We wanted to avoid that this year, and so we did
everything we could to get the money in fast, so that we weren't littering
the sites with banners for little return.


>
> In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that
> this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global
> social changes.


There did not seem to be any underlying changes in the world that gave us
this lift. In fact, we probably received less of a lift this year from
growing readership because so much of the growth was in mobile (where, I'm
sorry to say, we haven't begun fundraising consistently).

Several months ago, it felt to us like the world was getting a lot worse
for fundraising. Part of why we looked so hard for these new banners was
that the old banners started performing terribly in our weekly testing. So
we were extremely relieved when we finally found these new banners that
worked so well.

Our mission on the WMF fundraising is to minimize the impact of fundraising
on Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects while using fundraising as an
opportunity to educate our users about the uniqueness and beauty of the
Wikimedia movement. We're really happy that we reduced the impact
significantly this year and had more time to talk about the projects and
their editors in our "thank you" campaign at the end of December.

We're thinking now about how to make it all 10 times better in 2013!

Thanks for your optimism Milos!


> Although it would be great if the world is changing so
> quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the
> organization.
>
> [1]
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/27/wikimedia-foundation-raises-25-million-in-record-time-during-2012-fundraiser/
>
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-- 
Zack Exley
Chief Revenue Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Milos Rancic]

I'd really like to hear something more than a guess :) In the sense:
Could it be said that we are now reasonably financially safe?

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
> I read the official blog [1] about it, but it doesn't have rationale.
> And I am too lazy to analyze it.
>
> So, may someone give us the reasons why this fundraising finished so quickly.
>
> I have to say that I'm very positively surprised by this fact, as I
> was much more pessimistic in relation to the future fundraising.
>
> The main question -- which could be just guessed if we have accurate
> rationale for this fundraising record -- is how sustainable is the
> growth (or even the stagnation with this amount of money)?
>
> In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that
> this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global
> social changes. Although it would be great if the world is changing so
> quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the
> organization.
>
> [1] 
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/27/wikimedia-foundation-raises-25-million-in-record-time-during-2012-fundraiser/

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Oliver Keyes]

(personal capacity, for a moment)

I make this the...third or fourth? currently active thread on this mailing
list that has been turned into "make more money, pay more money and invest
it in credit unions".

James, I don't think there's anything you've said here that you haven't
said 2, 3, 5 or 20 times before. Regardless of if you're right or wrong -
and I'm not making a judgment call on that, because things like financial
investments are not in my skillset or domain knowledge - your suggestions
are not being put into practise. I've seen no sign from the replies that
anyone is planning on actively pursuing your (many) suggestions, for a
variety of reasons. At this point the best thing to do is probably to drop
the stick.

On 28 December 2012 17:13, James Salsman  wrote:

> > people are not contributing in the English language markets this
> > year as opposed to last
>
> What is the evidence for that?
>
> > because of trends when the English Wikipedia's popularity has not
> > significantly changed.
>
> English projects per http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews
>
> November 2010: 7.6 billion
> November 2011: 8.3 billion or +9%
> November 2012: 9.6 billion or +15%
>
> Along with my questions about lowered fundraising expectations which
> Zack specifically asked to re-post to this list, I would also like
> answers to my earlier questions about why multivariate testing can't
> be used to measure donations, because all of the multivariate tests
> published so far were used to measure donations. There is no doubt in
> my mind from the distribution of message performance that if we tested
> the remaining volunteer-submitted appeals from 2009-10, we could do
> twice as well per day as we did at the beginning of this month, and
> not just during these last days of the year when we are probably
> sacrificing $7 million to slashed growth rates, jettisoned Fellowships
> without community consultation, and salaries pegged well below that of
> other Bay Area technology employers.
>
> As for the reserve fund investment, I would like to point out that
> investment in securities which are expected to return less than
> inflation are a guaranteed risk that the purchasing power of donors'
> funds will diminish before they are spent. As far as I can tell from
> messages off list at Garfield's request, all reserve investments were
> expected to perform below the rate of inflation when they were
> purchased.
>
> Sincerely,
> James Salsman
>
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Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[James Salsman]

> people are not contributing in the English language markets this
> year as opposed to last

What is the evidence for that?

> because of trends when the English Wikipedia's popularity has not
> significantly changed.

English projects per http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews

November 2010: 7.6 billion
November 2011: 8.3 billion or +9%
November 2012: 9.6 billion or +15%

Along with my questions about lowered fundraising expectations which
Zack specifically asked to re-post to this list, I would also like
answers to my earlier questions about why multivariate testing can't
be used to measure donations, because all of the multivariate tests
published so far were used to measure donations. There is no doubt in
my mind from the distribution of message performance that if we tested
the remaining volunteer-submitted appeals from 2009-10, we could do
twice as well per day as we did at the beginning of this month, and
not just during these last days of the year when we are probably
sacrificing $7 million to slashed growth rates, jettisoned Fellowships
without community consultation, and salaries pegged well below that of
other Bay Area technology employers.

As for the reserve fund investment, I would like to point out that
investment in securities which are expected to return less than
inflation are a guaranteed risk that the purchasing power of donors'
funds will diminish before they are spent. As far as I can tell from
messages off list at Garfield's request, all reserve investments were
expected to perform below the rate of inflation when they were
purchased.

Sincerely,
James Salsman

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 1:51 AM, Milos Rancic  wrote:
>
> In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that
> this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global
> social changes. Although it would be great if the world is changing so
> quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the
> organization.
>
> [1]
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/27/wikimedia-foundation-raises-25-million-in-record-time-during-2012-fundraiser/


I greatly believe this is the product staff's work.  I was a part of
Fundraising 2010 for the WMF as a part-time contractor, and I've closely
followed the work of the fundraising team since.  Megan Hernandez and her
team have learned and grown each year, as has Zack and his work with the
team, on meta, and here.  The track record is quite clear, people are not
contributing in the English language markets this year as opposed to last
because of trends when the English Wikipedia's popularity has not
significantly changed.

Kudos to Fundraising 2012.  I saw about three banners and you met your
target in record time.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
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[Wikimedia-l] Rationale for fundraising record?

[Milos Rancic]

I read the official blog [1] about it, but it doesn't have rationale.
And I am too lazy to analyze it.

So, may someone give us the reasons why this fundraising finished so quickly.

I have to say that I'm very positively surprised by this fact, as I
was much more pessimistic in relation to the future fundraising.

The main question -- which could be just guessed if we have accurate
rationale for this fundraising record -- is how sustainable is the
growth (or even the stagnation with this amount of money)?

In relation to the question above, I'd be much more happy to hear that
this is the product of staff's work, than the product of some global
social changes. Although it would be great if the world is changing so
quickly, it's much more unpredictable variable than work inside of the
organization.

[1] 
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/27/wikimedia-foundation-raises-25-million-in-record-time-during-2012-fundraiser/

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