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Fundraising

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This is a general information page on Wikimedia fundraising. If you wish to make a donation, please visit https://donate.wikimedia.org

Who are we?

The Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team cultivates the resources that propel our movement. We engage millions of people from countries across the globe 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, 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 Wikimedia Foundation's budget through online campaigns. These campaigns have the additional goal to educate all readers about Wikipedia and how our movement works. We are grateful for all the readers, contributors, and donors who make Wikipedia and our other projects a global home for knowledge and discovery. To continue thriving we must constantly innovate, adapting to the changing needs of our readers and new advances in the technology that powers the Wikimedia universe. For additional information, please see the 2020–2021 Fundraising Report.

The Teams

Central

Working across teams and with the Partnerships team

Online Fundraising

  • Pats Pena
    Sr. Director, Online Fundraising

  • Sam Patton
    Senior Manager, Fundraising Growth and Innovation

  • Evelyn Martin
    Principal Payments Officer

  • Mariana Suijkerbuijk
    Lead Global Audience Strategist

  • Rakhi Kumar
    Payments Specialist

  • Katie Haggard
    Campaign Specialist

  • Moska Shaver
    Senior Email Campaign Specialist

  • Samuel Buissereth
    Campaigns Associate

  • Peter Coombe
    Lead Developer

  • Emma Hughes
    Senior Frontend Developer

  • Sadok Cervantes
    UX Design Contractor

  • Thea Skaff
    Senior Manager, Global Fundraising Campaigns

  • Haley Nordeen
    Banner Production Associate

  • Camille de Nes
    Lead Global Campaigns Strategist

  • Noah Israel
    Senior Email Campaign Specialist

Foundations & Major Gifts

  • Caitlin Virtue
    Senior Director of Development

  • Jerry Kim
    Senior Events Projects Manager

  • Jonathan Curiel
    Senior Development Comms Manager

  • Nora Nichols
    Development Data Associate

  • Rosie Lewis
    Development Analyst

  • Enloe Wilson
    Principal Major Gifts Development Manager

  • Jayme Simmons
    Development Associate

  • Desiree Bautista
    Major Donor Data Specialist

Fundraising Operations

  • Kristie Robinson
    Donor Relations Manager

  • Michael Beattie
    Senior Donor Relations Specialist

  • Sandra Hust
    Senior Donor Relations Specialist

  • Leanne Schreibstein
    Fundraising Operations Specialist

  • Kristine Hancock
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Amber Johnson
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Lefki Papadimitriou
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Tomasz Gorski
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Yamini Lavappa
    Donor Relations Specialist

  • Runjini Murthy
    Fundraising Analyst

Endowment

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

2012 Editor Video

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

For 2021/22 (Q3 and Q4)

GermanyEdit

Operated by Wikimedia Deutschland

  • Fundraising testing:
  • Fundraising Banners:

SwitzerlandEdit

Operated by Wikimedia Switzerland

  • Fundraising Banner Testing:
  • Fundraising Banner Fundraising:

Contact Us

Fundraising updates

See the full archive


Articles, videos etc. (here you find relevant articles about Wikimedia fundraising and finance)Edit

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.

2020/21 Fundraising Report

Five reasons Wikipedia needs your support (post supporting the 2021 English banner fundraising campaign) by Pats Pena

2021/22 Q3 UpdateEdit

Quarter 3 of the current financial year has come to an end and we wanted to give a quick update of the things that went on in fundraising.

In March, we ran our Italian fundraising campaign both via email to previous donors as well as via banners on the Italian Wikipedia. We tested different messaging and took into account the feedback we received from the communities throughout the English campaign. You can read here what we changed for the Italy campaign as well as for the upcoming campaigns of quarter 4, including an “I already donated” button on banners and more information for donors on the thank you page.

Some impressions from our donors in Italy:

If an extraterrestrial sentient being should ask me "as human being , what are you proud of ? " , I would answer "we made and maintain Wikimedia".

I just write to say that this is one of the happiest donations I do and shall continue to do every year. Wikipedia has achieved to lift the global spirit of humanity by making us recall how powerful are the fruits of knowledge in strengthening the bonds of all humans and breaking all lines of division. I use Wikipedia all the time, and I congratulate you for keeping high its spirit of objectiveness.

We also sent a planned giving informational email in March of this quarter. These emails are sent to an existing donor segment in the United States and invite existing donors to consider adding the Wikimedia Foundation to their will or get in touch with us directly if they are interested in learning more about this type of giving.

Thank you to all our donors, readers and volunteers in Italy who made our campaign a success. Thank you also to our past donors in the US who helped to further our planned giving programme.

We are currently preparing for the upcoming campaigns for quarter 4: Sweden, South Africa, Latin America, and India and will keep you updated.

2021/22 Q2 UpdateEdit

Quarter 2 of our financial year has just closed and it was the quarter with the biggest fundraising campaign of the year. We ran two major fundraising campaigns, one in France and one across English speaking countries. We are grateful to all of our donors who provide critical support to our movement as well as to the incredible volunteer community who creates a project that our readers find useful and want to support.

Let’s start off with France. As in previous years, we ran both a banner and email campaign in France. The email campaign went out throughout August, while the banner campaign took place in October. The campaign ran smoothly and you can read a bit more about Why should we give in Pats Pena’s post.

This brings us to our English campaign which is the highest revenue campaign we run throughout the financial year. It is composed of both email and banners and runs in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We sent three batches of emails between September and November to recent and recurring donors and are happy to share with you that our donors from past years showed their support and we reached our goal set for the email campaign by December. Donations from readers continue to grow as we build up our base of supporters over the years.

In late November, the banner campaign started across the English Wikipedia and ran throughout December. This year, we introduced ApplePay as a payment option available to readers to provide a convenient method that many readers use regularly and have requested in recent years. We continually strive to provide easy and preferred options for readers to support our movement. We focused on simplifying the donation process, particularly for readers on mobile devices. The team also continued efforts on increasing monthly recurring donors and are happy to see more readers supporting us year-round. As more readers give via monthly gifts and our email appeals, we’ve seen a rise in cases of existing donors still seeing fundraising banners, particularly because of our stringent privacy controls. We were excited to debut an “I already donated” feature in all our fundraising banners to help donors dismiss our content as intended. We are testing this towards permanent adoption in upcoming campaigns. We look forward to sharing more insights on the campaign in the next fundraising report.  

Prior to the campaign we reached out to community members and worked with them on our banners. Feedback on banners throughout the campaign has been very much welcomed and we integrated many aspects that were raised, including the I already donated feature mentioned above and better banner hiding after intentional closes.  Thank you to all community members, staff, donors, and readers who provided their insightful feedback and helped us constantly improve our work. Thanks to everyone’s support and work, we reached our goal by the end of December. Learn more about where donations go by reading this launch day post by Pats Pena.

To reach our revenue goal this year, we had to run the banner campaign for about a week longer than in the past couple of years. We heard from our volunteer community who monitor various community spaces that they saw an increase in questions and comments related to the campaign. We deeply appreciate all the work done to monitor and engage on this feedback and understand the challenge, particularly when comments from people with a negative perception on parts of our work are received. Thank you. We have seen the messages on our talk page and across the other community spaces and are reviewing them as a team. We have already adjusted some points raised and we are committed to improving in future campaigns. We will share more info about changes we’re incorporating in the upcoming campaigns in Italy and Sweden.

The Endowment and Major Gifts teams also reached their goals in Q2 thanks to generous major gifts and banner donations. The Endowment also received a 2 million USD gift from Arcadia Fund. Together with a 1 million USD gift made by Amazon in Q1, these were the largest gifts made to the Endowment during Wikipedia’s 20th birthday year. Thank you.

We started the planning process for our upcoming campaigns in Italy and Sweden. You can find more about the campaigns we are running in our current fundraising section.

As always, we welcome comments on the talk page and will answer them as soon as possible.  


See also
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