If you are surprised why the “Personal Appeal” banner is consistently doing so well – well, it looks like this: <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_testing50" rel="nofollow">http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...</a> and the alternatives look like this: <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_en_testing36" rel="nofollow">http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...</a>
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.
One more interesting coverage about this design is on quora:
<a href="http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-having-Jimmy-Wales-picture-shown-across-the-top-of-every-page-helping-or-hindering-Wikipedia-raise-money" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-having-Jimmy-Wales-picture...</a>
The one with Jimmy on it has 10 times more "conversion" than others. Impressive!<p>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.
Portuguese Wikipedia: 2 donations, $ 30,00<p>Because it's hard for Brazilians to donate via PayPal or credit card.<p>Always remember that donations schemes are not one-size-fits-all.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Any fund-raiser for these non-profits, including wikimedia, should at least include links to a balance sheet and profit/loss statement.
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.<p>They're just awesome.
I'm curious which <i>versions</i> of each type of banner did the best... (If I missed this in TFA, please let me know.)<p>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.
I thought he looked slightly zombie in this one, it freaked me out a bit :)<p><a href="http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-11-15-wales2.png" rel="nofollow">http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2010-11-15-wales2.png</a>