Policy talk:Fundraising principles

Implementation of the policy

Wittylama had a few comments about fundraising principles, particularly as applied to the annual coordinated banner campaign. Reposted here:

• "easily dismissible on mobile" (...the impossibly-small "x" icon to dismiss...)

I also find it hard to use the "X" icons we have for dismissing interfaces and overlays: both these banners and elsewhere.

• "Tell the OTRS team and appropriate Chapter (when applicable) when any major change (such as adding/removing a new payment method) happens in that language/country.

A "pull" solution might be simpler here: a page that lists all such updates, so that people can go and find the information when they need it. –SJ talk 

• "Maximal Participation: ...we should empower individuals and groups world-wide to constructively contribute to direct messaging."

rather than being ambassadors for our mission, wikimedians are feeling increasingly embarrassed

I can't speak to how different people feel, but I think having a network of tens of thousands of ambassadors is a great strength, and something we should be working through for every messaging campaign, fundraising or otherwise. –SJ talk 

• "Minimal disruption: ...causing minimal disruption and annoyance for users of the projects"

Instead, a desire to finish fundraising quickly is given higher priority.

As you say, "less disruption" != "shorter". I wonder what the fundraising team's internal measures of disruption/annoyance are: I know they are aiming for low disruption, not just short duration. For example, we now have a larger proportion of fundraising done continuously throughout the year in part because that is less disruptive.

I would be glad to see a longer campaign with better side effects. For instance, a campaign that leaves everyone who sees it feeling more inspired and enthusiastic, motivated to recruit others to get involved, rather than annoyed or guilty or concerned. I don't know how possible this is, but it's worth trying and striving for. –SJ talk 

• "Internationalism: ...our fundraising practices must support the easiest possible transfer of money internationally."

we've had the recent discussions about how donating is difficult from the Netherlands and impossible from Russia

I don't know the answers to these specific cases, nor how long it takes to implement changes. These issues do get regular consideration; I was glad to see a number of new ways to donate implemented in the past year, regionally and globally. –SJ talk  04:23, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Transparency...

"All Wikimedia fundraising activities must be truthful with prospective donors." I'm a bit concerned at the fact that this is listed as a principle signed off by the board, yet people have reported (on wikimedia-l) at having to "set things straight" with their friends who had been shocked and surprised at the wording which was being used. -- Chuq (talk) 07:10, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

summary of wikimedia-l thread "Fundraising banners (again)" / Nov 26, 2014 --

Summary of ~80 messages; editorializing by phoebe | talk 18:21, 5 December 2014 (UTC) in brackets.

communication re: fundraising season

• develop banner approaches in the off-season [the fundraising team already does this, but there's desire for community discussion too]
• if you do something new (in a geography etc.) make sure you communicate it to the stakeholders
• fundraising team seen as sometimes unresponsive [though acknowledged that this, the en.wp fundraiser, is their biggest crunch week]
• Also many thanks for the acknowledged very efficient, remarkable job at fundraising to the team; "The fundraising team is amazing at their jobs"

message content

• don't mislead about ads: potential implication that if we don't get the money we'll run ads is not ok [agreed.]
• don't mislead about WMF finances: potential implication that we'll go off the air immediately if you don't donate is not ok [note, I'm not seeing this in the current message, but I may not be seeing it because every fundraising appeal I've ever gotten is crouched in crisis terms.]
• message sounds like an obituary/doesn't sound like an obituary/is clear/is too American [the latter is a problem esp. with English Wikipedia messaging, I suspect]
• comments about emails, too [note, previous donors get 1 email a year]
• comment that 1/fundraiser a year is not true for those unlucky souls who get a/b tested
• as contributors, we want to be proud of Wikimedia, and not demotivated by the banners. some find the fundraising demotivating because of above points.

banner size

• pop-ups are no good [pretty clear consensus]
• sticky banners no good [I'm not sure if there's consensus on this point]
• banners that obscure content are no good [note, though we agree on the principle, I am personally skeptical about the claim of this banner interfering with our mission; the content is still right there]
• mobile banners too big, x to dismiss too small

brand image

• current messages are seen as harming brand image because of above content points
• harming brand image is not ok [I think we're all agreed on this]
• messages should encourage people to contribute content as well [def. worth exploring]
• user sentiment analysis is important [possible action point: maybe user sentiment re: brand should be more highly weighted in the banner tests?]
• what would happen if donors were shown financials alongside banners? [note this seems very impractical to me. The majority of donors do not have experience with big nonprofit finances or a scope of comparison. Yes, I look at the 990s of charities I give to, but I suspect I'm unusual in that way].

data

• we want all the data, because we are Wikipedians
• especially .. user sentiment methodology & raw data
• social media reaction: it seems very negative/more negative than past??/how much is there/should we worry about it?
• how many impressions do people see? Is it really less? [note, we've been trying to optimize for fewer impressions for a long while, hence the shorter fundraiser]

Performance

In many ways it's hard to measure how much fundraising costs to our mission, but the recent focus on frontend performance may help us. WMF should be measuring the impact of CentralNotice [some of which is permanent, because of how the extension is designed] and fundraising campaigns [this varies per campaign and banner] in terms of:

• time and resources needed by users to load our pages,
• time spent by them on our content,
• bounce rate.

These are pretty standard metrics across the web, so it shouldn't be that hard (Research:Content consumption metrics will hopefully help). Harder would be:

• likelihood that a user comes back,
• likelihood for users to get active editing,
• productivity for editors.

Or, said with straight words: can we confidently say that fundraising campaigns aren't killing some Wikipedias?

• I think it's well possible to kill a Wikipedia by adding some seconds to load time, scaring away huge portions of visitors and actively boycotting editors. So the question is worth considering (even if it may sound like trolling to some).
• By "killing" I mean causing/enabling/facilitating two-digits percentage decreases in page views or edits. Such collapses are happening right now, it's not philosophy. See Research:The sudden decline of Italian Wikipedia.
• It seems to me that WMF is not measuring "externalities" of fundraising in any way. (Not even banner impressions, let alone amount of users' screenfuls "occupied", or any of the metrics above.) So I'm pretty sure that we're not able to answer this question yet, but we should always be ready for tough questions.

--Nemo 21:16, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Just a quick try at gathering stats on number of anons editing enwiki. Its been a very long time since I took any sort of stats class (And that was just an intro), so I probably did this totally wrong... But it doesn't seem like there's been much affect on number of anons editing. Bawolff (talk) 08:02, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

MariaDB [enwiki_p]> select substr( rc_timestamp, 1, 8) as  'date', floor(((count(*) - 25005.3448)/25005.3448) * 100) as "% different from avg", ((count(*) - 25005.3448)/1713.1075) as 'numb std devs different', count(*) as 'total edits' from recentchanges where rc_user = 0 and rc_timestamp < 20141207000000 and rc_timestamp > 20141107990000 and rc_type < 5 group by substr( rc_timestamp, 1, 8 );
+----------+----------------------+-------------------------+-------------+
| date     | % different from avg | numb std devs different | total edits |
+----------+----------------------+-------------------------+-------------+
| 20141108 |                   -8 |             -1.14607215 |       23042 |
| 20141109 |                   -1 |             -0.07842170 |       24871 |
| 20141110 |                    8 |              1.25541170 |       27156 |
| 20141111 |                    7 |              1.13457865 |       26949 |
| 20141112 |                    5 |              0.81410840 |       26400 |
| 20141113 |                    4 |              0.62906455 |       26083 |
| 20141114 |                    1 |              0.23446001 |       25407 |
| 20141115 |                   -9 |             -1.20152693 |       22947 |
| 20141116 |                   -4 |             -0.48470093 |       24175 |
| 20141117 |                    6 |              0.98806129 |       26698 |
| 20141118 |                    7 |              1.13983226 |       26958 |
| 20141119 |                    5 |              0.80768732 |       26389 |
| 20141120 |                    2 |              0.43759963 |       25755 |
| 20141121 |                    0 |              0.00797101 |       25019 |
| 20141122 |                  -10 |             -1.37956596 |       22642 |
| 20141123 |                   -2 |             -0.23019268 |       24611 |
| 20141124 |                    7 |              1.04760221 |       26800 |
| 20141125 |                   -1 |             -0.10060361 |       24833 |
| 20141126 |                    1 |              0.25956059 |       25450 |
| 20141127 |                  -13 |             -1.81736686 |       21892 |
| 20141128 |                  -15 |             -2.10339678 |       21402 |
| 20141129 |                  -11 |             -1.53892549 |       22369 |
| 20141130 |                   -7 |             -0.95810963 |       23364 |
| 20141201 |                    5 |              0.82695056 |       26422 |
| 20141202 |                    7 |              1.08787989 |       26869 |
| 20141203 |                    6 |              0.98572635 |       26694 |
| 20141204 |                    4 |              0.66350489 |       26142 |
| 20141205 |                   -1 |             -0.06557954 |       24893 |
| 20141206 |                   -9 |             -1.21553656 |       22923 |
+----------+----------------------+-------------------------+-------------+
29 rows in set (5.54 sec)

Banner size/positioning

Please also see Phabricator:T78023, which is a ticket I started on this problem where I was redirected here. The size of the banner makes it difficult for registered users to log in. The banner should at very least be positioned below the #p-personal toolbar if not shortened. {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 21:17, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I think it should be shortened. My friends (who are not editors) are telling me how annoying the banners are, almost taking up the whole page, and that they somehow show up again everyday even after being dismissed. Tony Tan⁹⁸ · talk 20:39, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

Where from here

The initial flurry of opinions and objections has by now calmed down on the mailinglists and has been neatly summarised and commented on by Phoebe above (again, thank you). Lila suggested that if we all know better, come with suggestions, which is by all means fair. There is now a page on Fundraising banners/December 2014 for just that. So, now what? Do we still expect something to change this year? Are we aiming for next year or the following years? Are we just going to do the same thing next year? The last one seems the least desirable, but still the most likely outcome. What can we do to change that? Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 11:17, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Well, at least there is a physical limit: no matter how much they try, WMF can't make banners bigger than the devices on which they are displayed, nor have more banner impressions than page views. --Nemo 12:59, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Well, nice conclusion Nemo, but we need to somehow persuade WMF to reduce the banner size, perhaps to what it was before, but certainly not taking up the whole screen. Tony Tan⁹⁸ · talk 20:58, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

In terms of 'where to from here', I would like to directly call on SJ and phoebe, as well as the other "community members" of the WMF Board of Trustees to raise the issue at the next WMF BoT meeting. Specifically, I would like the BoT to request the WMF Fundraising team to proactively develop public "operating principles", in consultation with the community, for website and email fundraising. These operating principles should live on THIS page, below the general Fundraising Principles that have bene approved by the BoT in 2012. I think the excellent summary that Phoebe made here is the perfect beginning of a document. It should be written and discussed in the same manner that the Legal department discussed the changes to the Terms of Service. I believe that the process itself (not merely the outcome) would be important to help bring the wider community and the WMF Fundraising Team back on the 'same page' and help reset the relationship....

Hopefully in the future the Fundraising team doesn't feel like they're besieged by angry community, and equally, the community will feel empowered and inspired to go and tell their friends and family to donate. As it currently stands, I doubt if any Wikimedians are 'evangelising' for the fundraiser with their own real-world friends like we used to 5 years ago - which is a great shame... If we can't harness the projects' volunteers to help raise donations, then that's a pretty sorry state of affairs.

Also - the reason I think this should be a direction being requested from the BoT is to give it legitimacy and 'weight'. If random members of the community such as myself start writing a document here, that is only going to make the fundraising team feel like we're trying to undermine them and respond with agressive silence (like on wikimedia-l regarding the 'Russian question') Wittylama (talk) 21:44, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

On «harness the projects' volunteers to help raise donations», I'm not sure that's what the WMF wants. Usually, WMF likes to claim all merits for raising money from a silent majority of alleged "readers", while thanking an amorphous mass of anonymous editors, in order to be able to spend the money in whatever way they like. I really think that raising money here is the aim itself for WMF, to gain a position of authority and power over all the others. I don't see a solution for this problem. --Nemo 10:08, 18 December 2014 (UTC)