Wikipedia’s face to face results in online fundraising success

Nonprofit fundraising can sometimes be at its most effective when you encounter it almost subliminally, especially when your awareness of a cause is only triggered because you were online looking up some information. According to ‘typical internet user stats’ the odds are about 50/50 that you visited information utopia Wikipedia at some point during November and December? If you did chances are you may also have noticed at the top of the page the face of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales as the top banner on every page asking visitors to contribute to the running costs of Wikipedia/ The Wikimedia Foundation.  The six week campaign certainly caught my eye several dozen times as I constantly use the site to verify facts and information and I wondered just how succesful the pledge drive would be.

Wikimedia Foundation co-founder Jimmy Wales

The totals are in and the fundraising methodology proved to be a huge success with news that over $16 million dollars was raised by the 9 year old information resource over the six week span – with no formal or traditional fundraising campaign whatsoever – just a simple banner ad. Wikipedia have this realised their entire fundraising goal for the fiscal year in one sitting with the vast majority of donations being in the $10-$25 range, 500,000 people from 140 countries came together to support the only non-profit, user supported top-10 website in the world. Wikipedia felt that the face of Wales provided a great reminder daily that there are people and costs behind the organisation that is used by so many without considering the infrastructure costs. On the (strongly) positive side Wikipedia has absolutely no advertising which is becoming almost unheard of in 2011. The open source online encyclopedia has long taken pride in the concept of free information and the growth of unbiased / un-sponsored knowledge and the latest fundraising drive marks their most successful campaign to date. The only other viral method the organisation used was a twitter reminder to donate so that users wouldn’t have to spend more  looking at Jimmy.

Its a fascinating example of how a nonprofit can cover operating expenses online with a very subtle association by way of a constant (but is it gentle?)  reminder that you are receiving a service that you value for free. Wikipedia is a pretty animal but many will surely take a deeper look at the approach that they took. Is there a backlash? Of course there is, with cynics citing that the entire annual overheads of Wikipedia for servers, technology and staffing doesn’t come to even half of the amount raised – but I’ll leave discussion of that to conspiracy theorists. Better still I’d suggest reading their annual report from the link provided above. It was a bold and successful approach that can provide a lot of useful information, just like Wikipedia.