[Foundation-l] Facts

Thu Apr 19 14:28:44 UTC 2007

On 4/19/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> Sorry, Erik. It just doesnt hold water. This fundraiser was 1 million
> dollars. The last was four hundred thousand dollars. A nice increase but ....
>
> 386,000 came from a single anonymous donor. 60,000 came from Virgin. In
> other words, c. 450,000 of that came from two large donors.

There is no reason to expect that we will see a linear scaling of
small scale donations with traffic volume. It depends on
- which regions are growing the fastest
- what types of new users we are attracting (casual vs. regular)
- donation fatigue from past fundraisers
- messaging and goals
- general economic situation
- reputation of WMF/WP

and probably tons of other factors. This is exactly the reason that a
sustainable fundraising strategy has multiple "legs" to stand on. I
fail to see how the fact that we achieved such a multi-leg strategy
and increased overall donations substantially as a result, is a
negative. That said, of course we should continue to investigate
methods of increasing donations from our broad userbase; I'll post a
paper on this topic soon.

> As for mobile phone access and data feed negotiations, give credit where
> credit is due. Hmm, I think I played the key role in much of that.

You did indeed! We worked well together on this project, I think, and
it has been completed in a timely fashion thanks to the two developers
who worked on it, Purodha Blissenbach and Tim Starling, as well as
advice from Greg Maxwell and coordination by Carolyn.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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