2012 Annual Report/Wiki version/Fundraising
Shaping, Sharing, Growing — 2011–2012 by the Numbers — The year in Fundraising — When Wikipedia went dark for a day — Our key Media Stories — Wikimedia gets GLAM — Building a Legacy: Our work in Education — Monmouthpedia: A case study in innovation — Evaluation Summary from Ting Chen, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation
The Year in Fundraising
The tremendous generosity of donors, project users and the general public meant that our annual fundraiser attracted over £1 million in donations for the first time. It's this generosity that makes Wikimedia's work possible and everyone involved would like to say a huge, heartfelt thank you. This represents an astonishing 81% increase on the 2010 fundraiser and we received over 42,000 individual donations during November and December 2011.
Donations total aside, this was a year of other significant fundraising firsts, too. Thanks to our new status as a registered charity, we were able to claim Gift Aid on UK donations for the first time, leading to around a further £88,000 at no extra cost to donors. Around 50% of donations were Gift-Aided.
We also utilised direct debit as a fundraising method for the first time, which provides us with a regular, predictable income. In fact, nearly a third of the donations we received were via this method, helping us to remain on a steady financial footing for years to come.
Another first saw people promising to leave a legacy benefiting Wikimedia UK in their wills. These touching acts were both generous and inspiring.
Most people are familiar with our annual fundraising message from Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, but this year other messages were also shared from a dozen men and women who create and edit content on Wikipedia. Just over half the money we raised goes to the Wikimedia Foundation to ensure Wikipedia and other projects remain running and the rest supports our programme work in the UK.
The banner appeal didn't take place in isolation but was significantly supported by other activity. This included sending email messages to previous donors and a limited amount of direct mail. We also switched to more urgent messages towards the end of the appeal, which led to a further spike in donations.
The lessons we've learned from the 2011–2012 fundraiser should prove very valuable. For example, one surprising discovery was that images on leafy, green backgrounds appeared to raise more money than the cut-out pictures that had previously been standard. Once again, we’re very grateful to everyone who has donated their time, effort and funds to keep our projects operational.