--- Krzysztof Kowalczyk <kkowalczyk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I was just looking on Foundation's fund-rising
page and have two comments.
1. I think that "Merchandise" and "Donations" should be separated,
similar to what
http://www.mozilla.org/ does. I believe more people
would visit "Merchandise" or "WikiPedia merchandise" resulting in
more
sales => more funding. I believe that because in people's minds
"donating" and "buying cool stuff" (even if it ultimately leads to
funding a good cause) is strongly separated.
As a matter of fact I also like the way the Mozilla people have their website
organized in that regard. However we only currently have one page and that is
in pure HTML which is hard to maintain. The WMF website under development will
have more than one page for fund raising.
But don't expect a Wikimedia store anytime soon - selling merchandise is fairly
low on my list of priorities. We might eventually partner with ThinkGeek,
MandrakeSoft, or even Mozilla to sell Wikimedia/Wikipedia merchandise.
In more specific terms, things that could be done:
* a link to "Merchandise" on main
wikipedia.org page, in the nav
section, next to "Donations" link
There are already too many links and the amount of money we get per order is
paltry. Thus a direct link is not warrented.
In general I think that foundation should study what
Mozilla project
does for fundraising as they are not larger/more visible project but
according to
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110721 they
do much better at getting funding via. t-shirt sales ($15,000.00 for
mozilla vs. $460.90 for wikipedia).
Is that gross or net for Mozilla? How does the donation/t-shirt bundle come
into play? Our figure is net. Either way I plan to study many different
non-profit's websites to see what they do. I'm particularly interested in how
different NPR/PBS affiliates do this type of thing as well as free software
projects/distributions.
Things that I think
mozilla.org does better:
* much nicer web design. No offense, but
http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising is bad, both functionally
(it's hard to read, the copy isn't that great) and visually (compare
to
http://www.mozillastore.com/products/clothing)
It is hard to read at low resolution and the copy could use some condensing,
yes. But comparing it to Mozilla's clothing sales page is not valid or fair.
* selling t-shirts on open-source conventions
(linuxcon/oscon/devday)
which is what
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110721
implies that mozilla foundation is doing (I don't really know, I
haven't been there)
Again the focus on t-shirts is misplaced. We've had our CafePress shop linked
very prominently for some time now and have only seen a small trickle of money
come in from that. At the same time we have taken in close to a $100,000 from
donations.
Also, I think that Mozilla's "$50 donation
t-shirt"
(
http://www.mozillastore.com/products/donations/50shirt) is a good
idea. It could even had a text that says that e.g. "I donated to
WikiPedia", "I make Free Encyclopedia possible", "I fund Free
Encyclopedia" - something along those lines.
In the future perhaps. Right now that is not practical.
-- Daniel Mayer
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