Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing

by alexdong • 16 years ago

94 37 16 years ago

meta.wikimedia.org

yellowbkpk• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

ugh• 16 years ago

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... and the alternatives look like this: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...

jasonjei• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

the reason? photoshop

aniket_ray• 16 years ago

Personally, I found it the "Jimmy Appeal" banner the most irritating and invasive out of all the different methods they've used. Because of this (negative emotion), it was the only appeal that really affected me. So this morning I was wondering whether Wikipedia folks do test the impact of different methods.

I was also wondering how an attractive looking model would affect the contributions. Certainly worth the experiment.

alanh• 16 years ago

Yes. Showing a face (or to a lesser degree) demands MUCH more attention that text and simple graphics.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

I don't think that was the point being addressed. I think the point was that the personal appeal banner was better designed and much higher contrast (greater use of color, larger font sizes, gradients, etc.), whereas the other banners are lower contrast with smaller fonts and far more ignorable, regardless of the presence of a face.

alexdong• 16 years ago

One more interesting coverage about this design is on quora: http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-having-Jimmy-Wales-picture... 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• 16 years ago

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

ntoshev2• 16 years ago

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

cypherpunks01• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

citizenkeys2• 16 years ago

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.

aacook• 16 years ago

Agreed. I'm glad they're at least posting these findings, it's pretty interesting data.

gojomo2• 16 years ago

Huh? There's a big difference between 'never publicly disclose their financials' and 'gotta dig around wikimediafoundation.org for details'. It only takes a few clicks and searches to find lots of detail about their past and plans.

Also, as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Wikimedia's annual '990' tax form from prior years is a public record, available (among other places) at nonprofit directory site GuideStar.org.

They could make the info more prominent -- but what if including a link to deep detail results in fewer donations, whether because it distracts people or somehow convinces them their donation is insignificant?

As long as they're being honest and the info is available somewhere, their fund-raising campaigns should be free from other prominent requirements.

clistctrl• 16 years ago

it was a pretty quick google search: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports

citizenkeys2• 16 years ago

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.

blhack• 16 years ago

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.

og1• 16 years ago

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

drtse4• 16 years ago

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

exit• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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?

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

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

BoppreH2• 16 years ago

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.

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

Or Brazilians just hate Jimmy Wales, or...

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

BoppreH2• 16 years ago

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.

kroger• 16 years ago

It's not hard for Brazilians to donate via PayPal or credit card. It's as easy as someone in the USA. I donated today (I probably clicked on the English page, though) via PayPal.

stevenbedrick• 16 years ago

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.

yoak• 16 years ago

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.

Lessons learned from wikipedia's fundraising banner design

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