Jimmy 2010 Appeal vs. 2011 Appeal

A couple of weeks before the launch of the 2011 fundraiser, we tested a new 2011 version of Jimmy's appeal against the 2010 Jimmy appeal we used to launch the 2010 fundraiser. Throughout months of testing editor appeals, we found several successful elements to incorporate into Jimmy's new 2011 appeal. The new appeal started with a powerful line that emphasized Wikipedia's efficiency compared with the other top websites:

"Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 400 servers and 73 staff. Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 422 million different people every month – with billions of page views."

The 2011 appeal showed a big improvement over the appeal we launched the campaign with in 2010. The new message had a percent increase of 60% in amount over the 2010 message.

Please see the full test report: Media:Jimmy 2010 vs. 2011 Appeal.pdf