Problem
In 2018, around 5 million people donated to support Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Donating is a popular and necessary way for readers to contributor back to the movement; not everyone who cares about Wikipedia can be an editor. The online fundraising team has put considerable time into optimizing our campaign-focused banner appeals, but these typically run for only around 6 weeks out of the year. Many readers do not see these banners. There is a simple sidebar link to Donate on desktop, but it is easy to miss in a menu of unrelated items.
Please figure out a persistence way for people to support our mission thru monetary means, reducing the dependency on banner campaigns in the long run.
Background on initial test
In December 2018, during our annual English Campaign, the online fundraising team ran a short experiment via a CentralNotice banner to understand how donor conversion is impacted by increasing the visibility of desktop Wikipedia's sidebar Donate to Wikipedia link. Online Fundraising styled the link as a blue button:
link to page
And in our test, donations per impressions increased by 165%.
We're interested in further experimentation and discussion to answer some of the following questions:
- How do results look in other countries and languages?
- How is donor conversion affected over longer periods of time (our initial test ran for around 5 days)?
- Does a more visible donate link decrease clicks on other sidebar or page elements?
- Are there any community or foundation concerns about increasing the visibility of the link?
