Talk:Fundraising 2011/archive/2

Questions

• Does the Fundraiser have a mailing list?
• I'm interested in knowing whether the WMF could localize donation methods, especially in developing countries where credit card payments are not so popular. For instance, here in Kenya, if we'd use MPESA, then probably more people would donate. Abbasjnr 08:19, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi Abbas,

• There's a private fundraising mailing list mainly for staff and chapters, but anyone interested can apply for access (I'd probably support you). See Mailing lists/Fundraising for more information. Of course we all read foundation-l too, and public fundraising discussion often happens there.
• Localization is one of our top priorities this year, and we're actively seeking ways to donate more easily in other countries. I don't know if M-PESA has been considered at all, but it sounds cool to me. I'll definitely pass it on to someone who knows more about payment methods :) Pcoombe (WMF) 23:28, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

• Just a follow-up on Abbas' question: will the Foundation be opening up opportunities for people to donate in currencies other than the ones already supported? In the Philippines, for example, donations that could be made in Philippine pesos would probably be more popular than donations made in U.S. dollars, especially since we want to avoid foreign currency charges and losses for potential Filipino donors. Has there been any progress by the Foundation towards this? --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 18:30, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

• We can now say for sure that this year we will have huge number of currencies supported. I can't find the exact count at the moment but it will be about 170 currencies accepted in some way. Cbarr (WMF) - Production Coodinator 17:23, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Tax deductibility in Canada

I fully realize that this post will be either deleted or properly formatted for staying on this page by someone else in the very near future, but I had to post it somewhere :-). Anyway, I was just about to donate a hundred dollars or two to the Wikimedia foundation as part of my year-end charitable giving, but then I found out that I am unable to collect a tax-deduction receipt for this as they lack a Canadian office of any kind (despite the MASSIVE number of edits that originate in Canada, and the millions of hours Canadians have put into building Wikipedia). Someone else is now going to get my money D-: (Don't worry, it will be someone worthy and deserving, but I would have preferred to donate to Wikipedia). Thank you. maxrocks_1@yahoo.com

Thank you for your message. The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable organization with tax-exempt status in the United States. Our exemption status varies in other countries depending on local laws. We are currently working with our chapters to provide exemption status in as many places as possible; please bear with us, as this can be a lengthy process. I'm sorry we weren't able to offer it this year. The Canadian chapter is new and will most certainly be looking into this in the near future. If you have any further questions or comments, please feel free to contact us again. Pgehres (WMF) 22:52, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Core messsages - clarification needed

Can someone confirm that "#5 website" and "top 10 websites" refer to their popularity (most visited)? Also, not all translators are going to know that "#5" means "number 5". Probably worth adding a translation hint to the English version. Lloffiwr 19:55, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's correct. Good point about #5, I'll add a hint now. Thanks. Pcoombe (WMF) 20:16, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Reminder

Please remember not to have the banners of the non-Wikipedia projects say "Wikipedia" on them. This is something that is very often forgotten. --Yair rand 20:43, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Yep, as a keen Wikinewsie myself I've been annoyed by that in the past and will be doing my best to make sure it doesn't happen this year. So far our testing has been limited to Wikipedia. Once we get to the fundraiser proper I imagine different projects will have their own campaigns, which we can customise appropriately. Pcoombe (WMF) 22:36, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Where does the community come in?

Will there be much, if any, community involvement this time? I mean, Jimmy is going to win every time because tons of people know who he is, and most of the fundraising team is WMF staff at the moment, so will there be any more public solicitations for banners/appeals? ←fetchcomms 04:10, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi fetchcomms. You'd be surprised, Jimmy doesn't win all the time - we've already had a few people on banners who beat him (Brandon Harris and Steven Walling). We aren't soliciting banners in the same way as last year, but we are looking for editors to share their stories which can be turned into personal appeals. If you want to contribute to that you can email wikistorywikimedia.org - we're always looking for more. And of course the fundraiser would be impossible without the help of community volunteers, for example we're just kicking off our push for translators. Pcoombe (WMF) 23:30, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Using Javascript to display banners

Past fundraising banners were placed on pages via javascript in such a way that they caused the entire page to pop downwards after the page loaded. This effect is very irritating, to say the least. Is there any chance that this will be fixed in time for this year's fundraiser? --Yair rand 04:09, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Because of the way CentralNotice works, and the fact that we have location linked banners, this is trickier than it seems. It's caused by a delay in looking up a user's location from their IP address, which is hard to speed up. If we were to always wait for that to finish before rendering the rest of the page, it would noticeably slow down all page loads, even those without banners.

There might be a solution using placeholder banners which could work during the fundraiser, but there's quite a few possible issues there too. Nonetheless it's something we'll be looking into. Pcoombe (WMF) 23:51, 29 September 2011 (UTC)

Checking the location takes a long time to do and it's being done separately on every page load? Couldn't the data be stored in a cookie or something? --Yair rand 21:14, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

This may be exactly what Pccombe is talking about with 'placeholder banners'... but couldn't you place a container div around where the banner will go, and set it to the correct height? It would keep it from "popping in" and would be much less frustrating, as I often am hovering over a link about to click, and get scrolled down, sometimes resulting on clicking on another link.

Please do look into it. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked the wrong link because the page jumped when a banner loaded, I could afford a cup of coffee. ~ Ningauble 21:38, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Recurring donation

"Single donations unsurprisingly proved more popular, but we did have a number of people successfully set up Direct Debits". A "number of people" ? What percentage exactly ? What was the sample size ? --Ofol 07:34, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

I've just added some stats on the update page. It was only 6 people (compared to 191 making PayPal donations) but bear in mind this was a quick test just to check the system works. There was no attempt to particularly encourage recurring donations, so for example the amount options were still the usual one-time donation choices. There are already a number of ideas for increasing the number of Direct Debit donations, which I'm sure WMUK will be testing over the next few weeks. Pcoombe (WMF) 00:05, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Anglo-centrism

Hello, I have just worked on some translations, and I must say that I found some of the texts extremely Anglo-centristic, or US centered. For example the FAQ refer to a world where everybody speaks English and makes donations from the USA. That is the reason why noone felt to translate the latter part.

The Alan Sohn text is quite computer centered - I hope noone believes that "server" is a general word universally understood. But maybe that was the intention.

I would like to see that we are offered texts without such a bias, prepared in a neutral way, so that localizers can adapt and complete it easier to their languages and countries. --Ziko 10:39, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Ziko, saw your blog post on this topic too, very interesting. (Incidentally, have you read Le Ton beau de Marot? It's largely about this topic, I think you'd enjoy it.) Anglo-centrism is something we try and avoid when preparing the source text, but remember it's important to make the message as appealing as possible to our large English speaking audience too. So sometimes it's best to use a phrase that works well in English, and trust our (awesome) translators to apply their local knowledge and come up with a suitable equivalent - even if that's not a literal translation. As it says on the translation page tips:

We recognize that certain messages may not necessarily translate well, or appeal to every audience, so when translating you do not have to do an exact literal translation if you feel that you can offer a wording that achieves a similar effect, linguistically or culturally. If there's no wording that will work, just indicate that inside the translation request and leave a message on the talk page.

Another thing we'll be doing more of this year is localised testing. So we'll be able to get more detailed results on what appeals and banners work best in each country, and help tailor them better.

Regarding the FAQ, which sections in particular did you have issues with? Pcoombe (WMF) 22:04, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello, I thought more of the content. Couldn't there be a set for "global" or "Foundation" use, and a set for use to-be-"localized". In the FAQ, there is e.g. that invitation to Wikimania. --Ziko 22:30, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Well the invitation to Wikimania is just where the next one happened to be. We had exactly the same invitation in last years FAQ to Haifa :) If there's a similar large conference coming up in e.g. Germany, feel free to add that too if you like. Pcoombe (WMF) 23:33, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

That's why there should be country-neutral texts for the adaption. Otherwise people are not sure how much they have to stick to the original. --Ziko 22:12, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Some sort of bug with the banner

I guess this belongs at bugzilla but since it's not my bug and I'm not that familiar with bugzilla I'll just post it here. Someone reported File:Screen shot 2011-09-28 at 20.22.17.png at en:Talk:Main Page Nil Einne 12:55, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, this was already reported and should be fixed for future banners. Pcoombe (WMF) 17:38, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Problem with the 'Share a story' banner

I've seen it, I've read it, and for reasons of anonymity I'm not sharing a story. I'm getting annoyed by there being no 'hide' button on the banner. There's a close box, but the thing just comes back when I open another page. No matter how many times it pops in front of me, I'm not going to share a story. Why doesn't it have a 'hide' on it so that regular editors like me can get rid of it as we don't want to be permanently pestered? Peridon 20:17, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks you very much for the Report Peridon. This was never the intention but happened because of some unforeseen technical issues. It has been resolved now so should close as expected. If it doesn't please let me know! Jalexander 21:25, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

It hasn't appeared at all today. Thanks. Peridon 15:30, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

User made banners: outstanding question from archived thread

I'm replacing this thread from the archive for Zack's office hour because of the unanswered question at the end James Salsman 20:54, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Are we even testing the user made banners, or have we all but given up on them? Last year I was exceedingly pissed by how dozens of user made banners were proposed and the whole thing turned into the 'Jimbo Show'. Jimbo in stoic pose, Jimbo in funny costume, etc. Sven Manguard 21:11, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm guessing it has to be very very very very statistics driven since its all about numbers and nothing else. So I'm guessing jimbo will be back. Theo10011 21:31, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Many of the user made banners were tried last year, but it rapidly became clear that the Jimmy banners performed much better. No one wants to rely on Jimmy all the time though, and that's why a major focus of our testing so far has been on finding alternatives. We've had some successes already (e.g. the personal appeal from Brandon Harris), and the creative team are currently busy interviewing people at Wikimania to try and find even more powerful stories. Pcoombe (WMF) 21:10, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

There were many user submitted banners which have still never been tested even though there were resources and infrastructure built specifically to do so: at least a majority and above 70% if I remember correctly. How do you know that 70+% didn't contain any that performed above the Jimbo banners? Things like "Help us recruit more authors" weren't even tried! When will those be tested? What makes this specifically upsetting to statisticians is that we know the variance is large enough that there probably were top performers which have still not yet been tested. P.S. Please test photos of people with arms crossed against arms at sides and hands on hips (basic body language.) b:User:Jsalsman 21:29, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

There were several reasons why a lot of banners were not tested. One reason is that there were alot that ran on similar themes to banners that were tested and wern't successful, another is that the contribution campaign never ran last year, which meant that all the banner for that never ran unfortunately. There is a problem in that there is still only so much you can test in any one fundraiser. The more unsuccessful banners you run, the more you alienate readers, the longer the fundraiser has to go on for and the less money you raise. Although there is the possibility you could stumble accross the new jimmy, you dont want to wasting banner space. and you have to take into account the time to design, build, quality checks, monitor and report. It is also more than just banners that we look at. We test appeals, landing pages, forms, banner images and banner text which all take up production time and its not just stumbling across things either, its about refining them as well.

Also last year, the foundation was still somewhat finding its feet in testing and fundraising and although the capability to test existed, it really was limited in its resources. Lessons were learnt though and this year we should have a substantially better capacity to test. We have double the dedicated community technical staff, double the creative people, a dedicated statistician, double those working on production in addition to a similarly large donor response team like last year.

I will say that that last suggestion you mentioned is very similar to a test we ran earlier in the month (results to come) and what we found was that a picture of someone from the shoulders and up has consistently preformed well (these were banners with ryan kaldari and showed similar results to similar shots of jimmy ran last year). Jseddon (WMF) 22:28, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

I went over this math last year, and I forget the exact numbers, but you only need about 34 times the reciprocal of the average click through rate (less than 1000?) impressions ber banner to get a statistically significant measure of its click-through rate at a 95% confidence level. Your tests last year were wasting tens of thousands of impressions per banner. You have plenty of opportunity to test all the remaining banners in less than a day, if you wanted to. If I'm wrong, please tell me why. I know you test a lot of things, but the initial click through is the first step of the process and you really should at least optimize over the suggestions you already have before trying to squeeze a few percent on some downstream element. I'm guessing that the test harness you have now must have some manual component and you need more coding to be able to test a set of banner text strings in batch mode. Is that right? James Salsman 00:04, 23 August 2011 (UTC).

Speaking based on my own personal opinion as someone who has been involved in the fundraiser for 3 years (supporting and then running for 2 years with WMUK and now involved at the foundation), I would say we have already learnt the lesson and that is that personal appeals perform vastly better than non personal ones. We saw the exact same thing in 2009 as well. This isn't a new lesson either, its one that is at the core of fundraising for almost all non-profits, so it makes sense that we continue to look into this. In fact our testing this year is has shown we can equal jimmy with other personal appeals. I also dont think we the community should expect the foundation to test everything thats thrown at them. Its just not realistic given we dont have endless resources. I can promise you that we will be testing more this year, we will be testing more efficiently, and we will have more capacity which will allow us to test heavily not just in the US and Canada in the english language but globally. You are right that we have to optamize that first click, but the appeal really is just as important and thats been very clear through testing. You have to work through all stages and not just the first click. Jseddon (WMF) 17:00, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. I don't see any way to rule out the possibilities that simple, direct appeals can perform as well as your best performers, because of the statistical variance among messages which has already been established by existing testing; in fact I think it's mathematically likely that at least a few will. There is only one way to find out, and I hope you can obtain the tools necessary to test the large number of untested messages quickly, without manual intervention, using only a limited, statistically significant number of impressions, and I hope you will continue to share the results with the community so that more people can try to understand the patterns and refine the top performers. James Salsman 01:55, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Is that possible now? If not, what new software is needed to do this? 76.254.20.205 20:37, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

I would like to know this, please. James Salsman 20:52, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I understand from IRC that there is a 10 minute cache issue and that we can test 1,000 text banners per minute, so I recommend testing on 15,000 impressions instead (4/hour * 24 hours/day * 4 days = 384, about the number of untested banners last time I looked.) James Salsman 21:28, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

When does the fundraiser start?

A start date seems to be missing from the project page. Has it not been decided? --Bodnotbod 18:25, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

The 2011 fundraiser is scheduled to begin on November 7th. --Pgehres (WMF) 21:09, 18 October 2011 (UTC)