

Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design  - alexdong
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing

======
ugh
If you are surprised why the “Personal Appeal” banner is consistently doing so
well – well, it looks like this:
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_testing50)
and the alternatives look like this:
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_en_testing36)

~~~
jasonjei
I'm amused by the fact that I'm drawn into the picture of Jimmy Wales. It just
looks so inspirational; for what reason, I'm not really sure.

~~~
iliketosleep
the reason? photoshop

~~~
sliverstorm
(and a decent photographer)

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yellowbkpk
I know at least a dozen or so of those click-throughs are me trying to hit the
little "X" dismiss button in the upper-right corner. Yes I know Wikipedia
needs funding, no I can't offer any right now. If I've closed it a half dozen
times please don't show it to me for at least a couple page views.

~~~
sirn
If you're registered Wikipedia user, there's a little option[1] in user
preferences that suppress display of fundraising banner.

[1]: <http://cl.ly/1J08203O2C0l0R0x2v3V>

~~~
user24
and if, like the vast majority of wikipedia traffic you're not, there's not.

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alexdong
One more interesting coverage about this design is on quora:
[http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-having-Jimmy-Wales-
picture...](http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-having-Jimmy-Wales-picture-
shown-across-the-top-of-every-page-helping-or-hindering-Wikipedia-raise-money)
The one with Jimmy on it has 10 times more "conversion" than others.
Impressive!

I also like how the fundraising committee involves the community to design the
banners. It feels like a genetic algorithm trained/evolved based on human
clicks.

~~~
patio11
Any sufficiently advanced A/B testing setup is indistinguishable from Strong
AI -- it just has people embedded in the loop.

~~~
ntoshev
Strong AI is overrated: evolution beats intelligent design every time.

~~~
apl
It doesn't.

[EDIT: There isn't much more to say. The claim that (esp. natural)
evolutionary processes strive for streamlined and optimal solutions is simply
false, for various (even _a priori_ ) reasons.]

~~~
ntoshev
You should point out a counterexample. I guess it would reveal that your
definition of optimality is different from "evolutionary fitness", and it
shouldn't be.

Note I didn't claim that "evolutionary processes strive for streamlined and
optimal solutions". I have no idea how you derived that or why are all these
people voting you up and me down (I'd appreciate an explanation btw). I just
made a joke that I think contains a kernel of non-trivial truth, although I
don't believe it's true if you take it literally as a claim for a universal
fact.

Edit: Perhaps I figured out part of the voting - people think I disagree with
a popular HNer in an irrelevant way. Amusing.

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exit
why the fuck doesn't the banner on the english language site direct to the
ENGLISH "personal appeal"?

ip based localization is fucking imbecilic.

~~~
sesqu
What mystified me was all those mentions of {{$sitename}}. Is there an english
community-based site somewhere that shares the funds, but not the name, of
Wikipedia?

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Donations go to Wikimedia, so I'd assume the funding gets split among all
their projects[0]. If you take a look at, say, Wikibooks right now, you'll see
the same banner there.

[0]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia#Projects>

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BoppreH
Portuguese Wikipedia: 2 donations, $ 30,00

Because it's hard for Brazilians to donate via PayPal or credit card.

Always remember that donations schemes are not one-size-fits-all.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Or Brazilians just hate Jimmy Wales, or...

It's a bit preemptive to draw a conclusion like that.

~~~
BoppreH
Not preemptive, it's slow as hell to link a paypal account to your bank
account and few people use credit cards because of the ridiculous interest
rates.

I've been through this a lot before a couple of freelancer jobs filled my
paypal account.

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stevenbedrick
Anybody else bothered by the lack of p-values on these tables? Kudos to the
authors for doing some research to see whether there are differences between
the performance of the various landing page and banner designs... but the way
they're reported their results leaves a lot to be desired.

The the stated differences (in terms of mean donation as well as conversion
rate) between banners and landing pages strike me as pretty small (e.g.,
$26.92 vs. $27.07)- confidence intervals would be helpful here, as I suspect
that the differences aren't significant.

Also, is mean really the right metric to be reporting? I suspect that these
data aren't normally distributed, or, at the very least, have some outliers on
either side of the spectrum (some people who donated hardly anything, plus a
few "high rollers"), so it seems to me that the median would be a more
informative statistic.

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citizenkeys
My only concern with these fund-raisers for Wikimedia / Wikipedia are they
never publicly disclose their financials. You gotta dig around
wikimediafoundation.org for details.

Any fund-raiser for these non-profits, including wikimedia, should at least
include links to a balance sheet and profit/loss statement.

~~~
clistctrl
it was a pretty quick google search:
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports>

~~~
citizenkeys
Yeah... but if you're going to put up your face and ask for money, it would
make people a lot more comfortable if you explained how much of that goes
directly in your pocket and what you do to earn it.

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yoak
It is awesome to see them being so consistent and publishing all of this. I've
never seen a non-profit do so in such detail. Some of the comments here
(particularly the stats) might be very welcome there, on the talk page or
elsewhere. Presumably some at least will do that, and that makes them better
able to learn and understand than similarly-sized and staffed organizations
would be.

They're just awesome.

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blhack
I'm curious which _versions_ of each type of banner did the best... (If I
missed this in TFA, please let me know.)

To me, the first one I saw, where he is standing off to the right, wearing a
black shirt, in what looks like some sort of industrial area, is the most
effective.

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og1
I know it's Wikipedia, but it's still impressive that they can get 50k
donations in an hour.

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drtse4
I'm wondering why only in the italian version of the ad he is called Jimbo
Wales... weird.

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cypherpunks01
I thought he looked slightly zombie in this one, it freaked me out a bit :)

<http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-11-15-wales2.png>

~~~
enanoretozon
totally agree!

Also I browse with chrome at 144% zoom so that picture ended up taking more
than half my screen which freaked me out some more.

