Fundraising
Who are we?
The Teams
Central
Working across teams and with the Partnerships team
Lisa Seitz-Gruwell
Chief Advancement OfficerMegan Hernandez
Vice President of AdvancementJoseph Seddon
Senior SpecialistGuillaume Paumier
Principal Program Manager
Online Fundraising
Pats Pena
Director of Online FundraisingSam Patton
Senior Fundraising ManagerMariana Suijkerbuijk
Senior Email Marketing Campaign SpecialistKatie Haggard
Creative SpecialistMoska Shaver
Development SpecialistPeter Coombe
Lead Fundraising Production ManagerThea Skaff
Senior ManagerHaley Nordeen
Banner Production Associate
Foundations & Major Gifts
Caitlin Virtue
Senior Director of DevelopmentJerry Kim
Senior Events Projects ManagerJonathan Curiel
Senior Development Comms ManagerEnloe Wilson
Principal Major Gifts Development Manager
Fundraising Operations
Jessica Robell
Director of Fundraising OperationsMichael Beattie
Donor Services ManagerSandra Hust
Donor Services Associate
Endowment
Amy Parker
Endowment DirectorJason Adams
Planned Giving Specialist
See also: Fundraising Technology
Our 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.
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.
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.
Current fundraising activities
GlobalEdit
Operated by Wikimedia Foundation
- Japan Banners: September 1st - September 29th 2020
- US, GB, NZ, AU, CA, IE Emails: September 14th - December 11th 2020
- France Banners: September 29th - October 27th 2020
- US, GB, NZ, AU, CA, IE - Banner Testing (1-3 hours, one to several times a week): July 2020 onwards
GermanyEdit
Operated by Wikimedia Deutschland
- Fundraising testing: July 2020 - November 2020
- Fundraising Banners: November 2020 - December 31 2020
SwitzerlandEdit
Operated by Wikimedia Switzerland
- Fundraising Banner Testing: August 1st - November 15th 2020
- Fundraising Banner Fundraising: November 15th - December 30th 2020
Contact Us
- We have an FAQ for donors and one for community members.
- Please stay in contact with us on the fundraising talk page.
- IRC channel: #wikimedia-fundraisingconnect (publicly logged)
- To report technical software bugs in Phabricator, follow mw:How to report a bug and use the #wikimedia-fundraising project tag
- For a breakdown of how fundraising tech uses Phabricator, check out this wikitech page.
- For a calendar of all central-notice banners, including fundraising, see CentralNotice/Calendar
Fundraising updates
2020/2021 Q2 UpdateEdit
Since the launch of the Wikimedia Endowment, we’ve helped support it in part with contributions from our annual fundraising campaigns. For this year again we will be using some of our banner fundraising efforts being directed towards the Wikimedia Endowment. Banners on the Wikipedia portal and wikipedia app, along with major gifts fundraising, will remain focused on raising for the annual plan budget. The purpose of the Endowment is to act as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to ensure a base level of support for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. Once the Endowment reaches it's initial goal, it will provide revenue to support the projects of Wikimedia. It will not fully fund the movement's work, so it is not a replacement for annual fundraising, but it will supplement it in the future.
Fundraising banners will most likely come down over Christmas with a final push in the run up to New Years Eve. This year, our usual thank you campaign will instead be used to focus on Wikipedia's 20th Birthday celebrations for a few days in January. If you are looking to run an event, this is a reminder to finalize your Rapid Grant application for Wikipedia 20 by 23:59 UTC 15 December 2020.
Earlier this week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new collaboration with Plant Your Change to support the planting of 400,000 trees. For every donation of US$1 or more made to the Wikimedia Foundation during this collaboration, Plant Your Change — an initiative to plant at least 100 million trees in the next decade — will plant a tree to protect the environment. This is part of the Wikimedia Foundation's work to become more environmentally sustainable and conscious of our environmental impact while we work to make free knowledge available to every human being. You can read the Wikimedia Foundation's annual sustainability statement, which chronicles the total annual carbon footprint of our work and informs recommendations to meaningfully reduce future carbon impacts. You can read more about the movements broader work with volunteer-led efforts, including the Wikimedia Sustainability Initiative aimed at reducing the environmental impact of the Wikimedia projects.
2020/2021 Q1 UpdateEdit
It’s been a very busy start to the beginning of this financial year. We displayed fundraising banners in the Netherlands through the month of July and completed our first major fundraising campaign in India in August. Email campaigns ran in France and Japan, and we’ve just launched our Japan banner campaign. We also resumed our Multilingual Bundle campaign which runs in 12 countries at a low level, which we paused at the beginning of the pandemic to allow the team to adjust plans and our messaging to reflect the new norm we find ourselves in.
The big end of year fundraising campaign on the English Wikipedia takes significant amounts of preparation and we’ve been “pre-testing” all through the summer. Our email campaign has just started this week and we expect the full banner campaign to launch at the end of November. We’ve begun work on our 2019-2020 fundraising report and that will come out later this financial year. In the meantime you can check out the final tuning session for Q4 of the 2019-2020 financial year.
We’d also like to share some recent departures and arrivals in the fundraising team. Caitlin Cogdill, one of our Senior Managers in Online Fundraising, departed to take up a new opportunity. The whole of the fundraising team and staff across the Wikimedia Foundation wish her well for the future and thank her for her significant contributions. We welcome Haley Nordeen to our production team, where she will be supporting our banner campaigns. And finally, Advancement would like to thank Nick Wilson for his support and guidance whilst Joseph Seddon was on secondment. Seddon has now returned and is supporting the whole Advancement department.
ArchiveEdit
For past updates, please see our update archive.
See also
- Erik Moeller and Domas Mituzas on fundraising since 2010