[Foundation-l] Fundraising totals as of Oct 7, 2007 @ 5:00 PM (EST)

Fri Nov 9 02:35:48 UTC 2007

For a bit of perspective, those numbers still aren't great.

Overall traffic is up 40% since the 2006 fund drive, but after a similar
number of days, the 2006 fundraiser had slightly more donors[1] and about
$350,000 more in donations.

If I understand correctly, much of the extra income was from donation
matching (including $286,000 from one source), while thus far we don't seem
to have had any donor matching efforts.  Even given that, it is also
disappointing to see that the number of individual donations hasn't grown in
response to growth in traffic to Wikimedia sites.

Overall, I'd say that thus far the performance of this drive is poor.  The
bump from the new banner has kept it from being awful, but we are still
quite a ways from what I would call good.

If the Foundation is really serious about a budget of $4.6M for the next
year (or anything approaching that), then raising only $30k per day isn't
going to do it.  At that rate, they would need 5 months of fundraising even
with the unrealistic assumption that income wouldn't decline due to donor
fatigue.

-Robert Rohde

[1] I'm excluding the 900 donations of 1 penny.  It appears that 1 or more
people are systematically donating pennies to pump the donor counter.  A
similar trend was not present in 2006.