Fundraising
The Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team cultivates the resources that propel our movement. Every year, we engage over 2 million people from countries across the world to support Wikipedia and its sister projects. The overwhelming majority of the Foundation's funding comes from individual readers from all over the world giving an average of $15.
Donations help the Wikimedia Foundation maintain server infrastructure, support global projects to increase the number of editors, improve the software that supports our projects, and make Wikipedia and its sister projects accessible globally to millions of people. The fundraising team is responsible for raising the Foundation's budget by running banners on Wikimedia sites. These banners have the additional goal to educate all readers about Wikipedia and how our movement works.
Goals
A Global Project
Readers around the world show their support for Wikimedia each year. The Wikimedia Foundation receives donations from nearly every country in the world in over 80 currencies, 20 payment methods, and 50 languages. We strive to provide readers worldwide with the best localized donation experience possible by offering preferred local payment methods and high quality messages in local languages. If you would like to help translate fundraising messages, please get involved.
Testing and Optimization
The online fundraiser is based on constant testing and optimization of different themes, messages, designs and user flows. We aim to educate all Wikipedia readers about our movement, provide a convenient donation process, and minimize the disruption of fundraiser banners on the reader experience. Only a tiny portion of readers donate -- therefore, we must always be improving our methods.
For more background on testing over the past several years, please see our fundraising reports from 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.
Educating Readers
Another goal of the fundraiser is to educate Wikipedia readers about the Wikimedia movement. We do this through the messages displayed in banners as well as through creative content featuring the Wikimedia community. Over the years, we've run personal appeal messages from community members, featured videos introducing Wikimedia volunteers, and invited readers to join in editing.
Frequently Asked Questions
- We have an FAQ for donors and one for community members.
Communication
- Please stay in contact with us on the fundraising talk page.
- IRC channel: #wikimedia-fundraisingconnect (publicly logged)
- Mailing list: fundraiser (archive). This is the open-subscription and public successor of the now closed private fundraising list (see Mailing lists/Fundraising).
- To report bugs in phabricator, please use the #wikimeda-fundraising tag
- For a breakdown of how fundraising tech uses phabricator, check out this wikitech page.
Latest Updates
2015-2016 Q1 Update
The Wikimedia Foundation has just wrapped up the first quarter of the 2015-16 fiscal year. Over these past three months, the fundraising team has been running ran campaigns in Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Belgium and Luxembourg and prepared for the upcoming year-end English fundraising campaign. The online fundraising team missed the $6 million goal for the quarter due to postponing the Italy fundraiser to October to support the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. We raised roughly $5.7 million in the first quarter of the year and plan to make up for the loss in the next quarter. The 2014-15 fiscal year fundraising report was also posted in this quarter. If you haven’t read it yet, please do check out the report for a wealth of information on the last fiscal year.
The team has used this first quarter to test a wide variety of brand new banners. From images, to banners highlighting photos from Commons, and different messages, we’ve found a few new ways to share the fundraising message with Wikipedia readers. With updated designs, we’ve ended the quarter with a banner that performs roughly 20% better than the best- performing banner from last quarter. Better performing banners are required to raise a higher budget with declining traffic. We’ll continue testing new banners into the next quarter and sharing highlights as we go.
The banner message has also been updated with suggestions from the Wikimedia community. Thank you to everyone who has suggested improvements so far! We have changed “We survive on donations averaging about $15” to “We are sustained by donations averaging about $15.” We’ve also changed “Please help us end the fundraiser and get back to improving Wikipedia” to “Please help us end the fundraiser and improve Wikipedia.” These message edits did not positively or negatively affect donations and were made in response to community feedback. In the past, we have also relied on community feedback to improve our campaigns. In the last year, community feedback has led to improvements to the usability of the close X icon and a new line to highlight the editing community, “Wikipedia is written by a community of volunteers with a passion for sharing the world’s knowledge.” All of these community suggestions remain in the banner. Another sentence that was briefly tested on a small percentage of users about a year ago that received negative community feedback was “If everyone reading this gave $3, we could keep it online and ad-free another year.” We did not end up using that sentence for the campaign and we commit to not using it in any future campaign. In the next quarter, we are planning many more message tests -- with both brand new ideas as well as smaller tweaks to the existing text. If you have an idea to test, please share on the 2015-16 test ideas page. Thanks again to everyone who has shared ideas so far.
This upcoming quarter will be our biggest of the year with campaigns in Italy, France, the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. The team is focused on providing the best donation invitation and experience possible to readers. We will be sharing plenty of more information about the upcoming campaigns over the next couple of months. Thank you for your support! MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 20:52, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
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Best performing banner July 2015 -
Trees Banner Example -
Commons photo banner example -
Commons photo banner example -
Commons photo banner example -
Graphic banner example -
Text and graphic banner example -
Text and graphic banner example -
Best banner from September 2015 -- a 20% improvement over the best banner from July 2015.
2014-2015 Fundraising Report
The fundraising team is happy to share the report on the 2014-15 fiscal year fundraising. Please take a look at the report and we look forward to your feedback on the report talk page.
Thank you to Wikimedia volunteers, readers, donors, staff and fundraising team for making this the most successful year yet. MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 01:28, 1 October 2015 (UTC)
Articles, videos etc. (here you find relevant articles about Wikimedia fundraising and finance)
Building a secure financial future for Wikipedia by Lisa Seitz Gruwell
Foundation 360 Building the relationships and resources we need to thrive Interview with Megan Hernandez, Advancement Department
The finances of free knowledge Lessons in transparency and impact by Jaime Villagomez
Annual Plan Conversations - Advancement and Finance and Administration Departments watch Lisa Seitz Gruwell and Jaime Villagomez take questions around the 2021/22 annual plan.
Five reasons Wikipedia needs your support (post supporting the 2021 English banner fundraising campaign) by Pats Pena
7 reasons you should donate to Wikipedia by Lisa Seitz Gruwell
2024/25 Q1 Update
We started off the new fiscal year with launching the community collaboration page for our English campaign. Our English campaign runs in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and is our biggest fundraising campaign of the year. On the collaboration page we invite volunteers to work together on banner messaging ideas ahead of the campaign, during our pre-test phase.
This year we attended Wikimania and ran a banner fundraising messaging workshop. We had about 25 participants at the workshop and had a good conversation with them. We heard some new points from the volunteers in the room. Such as the suggestions to:
- Use more visuals in our banners, particularly photos of editors and other examples of “Wikimedians in action.”
- Highlight the work of the community in the banners
- Include a goal thermometer or other specifics on our targets for a given fundraising campaign
- Personalize banner messaging more based on article category, geographic location, etc.
- Encourage editing as a secondary call to action, which we already do on our Thank You page and can probably pull forward into the banner flow for non-donors.
In order to build a long-term sustainable revenue model, we are looking to diversify our fundraising channels. This year, in the U.S., we are launching two new ways for people to give, SMS donations and direct mail. Both channels are common and widespread fundraising methods in the U.S and help us serve different audiences. New formats –like mail– will also allow us to bring broader awareness to our nonprofit mission.
In Q1 we also ran email and banner fundraising campaigns in India and the Netherlands. For both campaigns we created collaboration pages, engaged with volunteers on- and off- wiki and worked together to ensure localized banner fundraising messages. In Q2 we will be publishing our latest fundraising report with insights from the past fiscal year.
You can find all past and current collaboration pages above.
2023/24 Q4 Update
We wrapped up the last fiscal year successfully and are thankful for everyone’s contribution and engagement. You will find more information on how the year went in our forthcoming fundraising report.
During Q4 we ran banner fundraising campaigns in a wide range of countries and created community collaboration pages for each of the campaigns. You can find all the collaboration pages above. Additionally we hosted community calls and engaged with our communities on talk pages to hear their feedback and work with them on banner messaging.
Spotlight Japan:
We worked with the Japanese community on refining our banner message in Japan and were able to adopt a new message which was based on community conversations.
We also used Q4 to prepare for our new financial year starting in July. We launched collaboration with the Indian communities around the upcoming India campaign and engaged with community members on the talk page. We also kicked off our collaboration with the English community around our English fundraising campaign. With pre-tests that started from mid-July, we want to collaborate now to ensure feedback and suggestions are heard and to improve the campaign this year.
See also
- Erik Moeller and Domas Mituzas on fundraising since 2010