Archive:Fundraising 2009

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Contact people

Unless otherwise noted, these people can be contacted through flastnamewikimedia.org.

Anything

• Rand Montoya

Technology

• Tomasz Finc
• Fred Vassard
• Trevor Parscal

Translations, other language pages

• Casey Brown, mecaseybrown.org
• Alex Zariv, az1568gmail.com

OTRS

• Anya Shyrokova
• Ryan, rjd0060.wikigmail.com

To-do

See Wikimedia:To-do#Fundraising-related.

Translations

Publishing instructions

It's best to use a browser with tabs for this.

1. Open the English source (for example: core messages)
2. Open the translation in a tab next to the English pages.
3. Open up all the pages using the links below, they'll auto-fill the English source (or last year's translation for the footer) and open up the "destination".
4. Fill in the pages with the translations, for the most part they're in the proper sections. However...
   • "Ways to Give" (other-ways-link) and "Help protect it, now." (story-text-link) are two that are in "Other lines to translate"
   • non-profit-text, give-to-chapter-text, and validation-error-minimum should be in last year's page if it exists (Donate/Now/xx)
   • If we don't have a translation for something, leave it in English. There will be another request soon for the missing pieces.
5. Some specific "localizations" to keep in mind.
   • Links to FAQ/en, Chapters/en, Donate/Donor Privacy, Ways to Give/en, Stories2/en, etc. should link to the English pages.
   • Links to Special:ContributionHistory and DonateNonJS/en should link to translated pages (just add the language code for the special page; change DonateNonJS to Donate/Now/xx)
   • Currency should use something fitting for the language (it might also be on last year's page). Check Wikipedia to see what countries the language is common in and see if we support an applicable currency. If not, leave it in USD. If you notice that the country is on the poorer side, lower the default USD currencies.
6. CentralNotices. There are a lot.
   • Be sure to change "Wikipedia" in the local language to {{SITENAME}}. If it looks too complicated for you (weird script, seems like the letters at the end are different, etc.), leave a message for Alex or Casey.
   • Lowercase the words... make your best judgement by looking at what they do with "Wikipedia Forever" in Phase 3. Don't capitalize them by hand, use {{subst:lc:}} – a character may look like a Latin one, but could actually be something different.
7. Smile at your work, then move on to the next language.

Reminders for next year

At the moment, this is a bit of a whining list. However, the points raised on here are important and will be converted into something more clear when the fundraiser's over. Please expand this list.

1. Don't rush. Start putting things together earlier. If a deadline is nastily approaching, change it.
2. Do things properly with thought-out rationales — don't just redirect last year's page to the new page, move all of the pages at once (either with a bot or script) so we can keep them around. You never know when we'll need them again, either for translations, code, or just to see what last year was like.
3. Don't reinvent the wheel.
4. Communication amongst the team members could be better. A public fundraising channel on IRC is the best solution (we had something like this in 2008)... private things can be moved to IM or PM.
5. Use a testing platform/site (dev.donate.wikimedia.org) that's actually like the final destination... create draft notices *in* CentralNotice, so we don't have to re-invent things.
6. Numbers in the translation request are helpful (like in last year's request)
7. Quadruple^nth check that you have all the strings included in the translation request.
8. If we're going to have a link within a string, make sure that that's noted in the translation request.
9. Have working drafts available. Screenshots are better than nothing, but a working demo is <3.
10. Community feedback was weird this year: the beginning (donation buttons, etc.) was full of it and then the final result (WIKIPEDIA FOREVER) was just handed to the community without much say in the matter.
11. Be more diligent in responding to translator questions.
12. Staggered launches worked great.
13. Create a separate notice template with all the shared pieces that are specific to this fundraiser. (all donate-url's, all Support Wikipedia's, etc.)
14. Communal To do list worked well.
15. Cross-browser checking *while developing*.
16. Don't go half-way on the Wikipedia vs. Sister projects issue, it just leads to confusion.
17. Don't piss off the chapters.

    (A lot of stuff is included under this header, we can't forget to work this out with them on internal.)

18. Reuse. Multiple pages with exactly the same thousand characters (save for a few small changes) should be avoided (e.g. Support Wikipedia/en & Support Wikipedia2/en... but it could be even better, like just saying "if the page name starts with Support Wikipedia2, show these strings; if it doesn't, show these")

    An extension of this is stuff like Donate/Benefactors/en and Benefactors.

19. Making the page look like a wiki is b.a.d.

    Ugly page title.

    People are more likely to try to leave feedback on talk pages, get accounts to translate, etc. We didn't have these issues in the past.

    Did I mention ugly? ;-)

    ...

20. If you're going to use translations on another wiki, make sure those translations are kept up to date. (*cough*payments.wm.o*cough*) There are many ways to do this, but it should be an automated way like scary transclusions/LocalizationUpdate or a bot.
21. Don't use two templates that do the same thing. Merge them. (c.f. Template:2009/Donate-header/en, Template:2009/Donate-banner/en)
22. The fundraiser occurs during two big holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah. The world shouldn't end because people go away – we need to plan for that.
23. If you're too busy to make the changes, make it possible for someone else to do them. (i.e. updating extension codes on SVN to point to the correct pages)
24. The Launch feedback and Alternative banners pages worked well, but they should be easier to get to from Foundationwiki (people jump to the talk pages and reach a dead-end).
25. I liked how Meta-Wiki's sitenotice pointed people to the fundraising pages.
26. The fundraiser runs on CentralNotice, the bugs should be fixed and the extension should be cleaned up.
27. Before announcing any major fundraising campaign or slogan, register the domain first.
28. Not many people enjoy BEING SHOUTED AT. (e.g. no caps lock)
29. The fact that we had an international set of messages and an English-only set worked out great. We could test new strings without wasting translator work.
30. A minor pet peeve of mine (and I know others like Dami felt the same) was that you couldn't open the GeoIP links in a new tab because of the way they were handled through javascript.
31. Better rtl support. We were great at this on the wmf pages side, but we could use more work:
    • on the notices (if we have to hardcode a direction, we should make it a "shared space" field... like wherever it says "right" change it to {{{right}}}; not the best solution but workable)
    • on the other sites (like payments).
32. Every year we are asked about donating in Indian rupees. Please! (Wikimedia India. :D)
33. "Ways to Give" is pretty ugly and un-userfriendly, we might want to put more thought into this.
34. Help chapters support alternate donation options more easily (i.e. iDEAL for NL, some RU thing, etc.)
35. Allow more than just credit cards and PayPal (Amazon and Google Checkout were suggested)
36. Implement a ?usenotice=Blah (great for troubleshooting)
37. Better infrastructure for facilitating other types of donations (non-monetary). We always have people looking around for other ways to contribute, a lot arrive at the "Volunteering" section. We need to find a way to better tell these people what we need and get them to help us.
38. <style> tag elements need to be specific; the banners broke link underlining behavior for a few hours. (LF)
39. "The "hide" button should actually HIDE the effing thing. If we don't want to see it we don't want to see it. I'm not going to give you any money regardless." => The perennial suggestion, take it or leave it. (LF)
40. Daily updates during launch were great.
41. Some way to fully localize the whole site (this isn't just fundraising-related, but related to all of it... this issue is just highlighted when we have everyone coming to our site). (LF)
42. Nice suggestion on Launch Feedback: give the option to tweet out your public comment at the same time. (LF)
43. Allow more than just credit cards and PayPal (Amazon and Google Checkout were suggested) (LF)
44. Use better defined css-styles. We should be able to create a gadget that only hides the fundraising banner (or the specific year's fundraising banner), rather than all CentralNotice notices. It would also be nice if we could change specific attributes of specific notices locally (c.f. the Chinese issue where the Jimmy banner used the same colors/styling as death notices on zhwiki).
45. Lets make sure our error messages are clear. "You must enter a valid amount (for example "25")." is better than "You must enter a valid amount." (A lot of people were confused this year... they tried entering things like "$25" in the blank and didn't understand why it wouldn't work.)
46. Allow searches for donor names on Special:ContributionHistory. (FWF)
47. I liked how we put all the supplementary messages/pages in one translation request this year, it worked well.
48. Translate the thank you letter too?
49. Don't use a local Template:2008/Contribution history introduction/en again. Include the content in the MediaWiki messages to translate.
50. About page names, use the same basic page name every year (i.e. "Donate/es" or "Dona") and just change the page to either redirect or translate the current year's donation module (i.e. "2009/Donate/en").
51. More currencies? PayPal seems to now accept: MXN, BRL, MYR, PHP, TWD, and THB. Any reason we don't support those? I know we've gotten requests for BRL already.
52. Support/en is ugly. 'nuff said.
53. Be more culturally sensitive and include other social networks than just American/European ones (this is a great breakdown by country/continent). There's not really any issue in having too many social networks. Notable exceptions: MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Live Journal, Friendster.
54. More time to publish translations would be nice. Trevor had a great idea of formating the Jimmy notices so that the number of lines/line break locations were automatically adjusted based on the translation. Unfortunately because we had to publish it quickly, we didn't preserve this great idea. (This is a note to translation publishers as well as to fundraising staffers.)
55. Put the social bookmarks template on Jimmy's appeal too -- we want people sharing that as much as, if not more than, the other pages. (Someone brought this up on LF too.)
56. When we say "Where does my money go? People and technology", people think that's all their donation goes to. They assume that it's wayyyy too expensive to run the website on the technical side and/or the staffers are paid too much and they're taking advantage of the volunteers. We need to highlight the "other stuff" we do (Wikipedia Academies, etc.). (This was brought up countless times on LF and caused quite a bit of the confusion.)
57. E-mail (or a communal IRC channel) is always a better option than an IM for a status update. The only time we should be IM'ing is if it's a quick question or task that needs doing.
58. Last minute additions of texts to any piece that has been translated already is bad. :-( Certain things need to be planned ahead of time.
59. Why not support recurring payments again?
60. Someone suggested links to statistics on the "Thank You" pages. (blog post)
61. Border to separate translation groups?
62. Allow languages to pick their own quotes (for both banners and letters)? For example, the German pages could also include donors to Wikimedia Deutschland. Different cultures react different types of quotes.
63. Make it so that all the links on the donation pages open in another window? This will help make sure that people actually stay on the donation pages. (FWF)

    Possible solution: add <base target="_blank"> to the header template and then only specify <a target="_self"> on the "donate" links.

64. Quite a few of the translations complained that Jimmy's Thank You (and, well, most of the campaign) was too American and did not port well to other languages/cultures/nations. Something to keep in mind next time.
65. We need to change the "other languages" box ({{DonateLang}}) depending on the page. We don't want to link to the "Support Wikipedia" pages on Appeal/en.
66. Before we setup donation links to our "friends" (see Jimmy Thank You/en), we should ask them if they do any donation tracking. It would probably be nice of us to add some sort of ?utm_source=wikimedia&utm_medium=thankyouletter or something like that so they can figure out where all that money came from.
67. The press releases need to be ready early so that the chapters can create their own copy.
68. Add another statistics page (or expand the existing ones) with number of clicks and donations per language page and wiki.
69. Refresh language priority lists.
70. Remember that next year's Wikipedia Day (Jan 15th) will be our 10th anniversary, we'll definitely want to work that in. (foundation-l)
71. Expand tracking system:
    • tell chapters what format they should use when they link to our pages (some use just a random link like one that specifies a certain notice and they mess up our stats)
    • don't use wrong tracking information when making url-shortened things (i.e. attributing it to a certain notice), either use a predetermined one or don't use any
72. I didn't really understand what was going on with the extensions-side (MediaWiki extensions in SVN/translatewiki) of things this year... need to work on that next year.
73. ...

From a chapters point of view

1. Involve the chapters more, and communicate more
2. Provide heads-up of planned changes before they happen, and ask for feedback
3. Have as many possibilities for volunteers to help as possible (donation messages, page design, ...)
4. Don't break the GeoIP functionality ;-)
5. When things go wrong, say what's going on rather than leaving people in the dark (they start complaining then. ;-) )
6. Don't make it all about Wikipedia - that's not all that Wikimedia is about.

Rand Notes

1. Jan_eissfeldt: hire more technical support; call for local slogan/banner/x-proposals by the project communities with a deadline and central evaluation by a team of volunteers/chapter persons/committee, responsible to you. that maybe generate, combined with a strong core message of the foundation or jimbo, more specific fundraising potentials on the one hand and productive volunteer-activicy on the other
2. Rjd0060: Between Nov 10-20 (226 emails), Nov 21-30 (236 emails), Dec 1-Dec 10 (562 emails), Dec 11-20 (1321 emails), Dec 21-31 (1586 emails), Jan 1-5 (324 emails)
   • out of 4255 total answered emails in donations queue, 1066 emails were answered by staff
   • more than 5 volunteers are needed for OTRS donations queue, particularly to handle the rush during the holiday season