Fundraising Survey (2009) Options Rating

[thekohser]

Get your comments in now!

(As this email may enact changes that affect the total Wikimedia
community, please feel free to forward or post this email on any and all
applicable lists. We would like as much feedback as possible.)

Wikimedians--

In advance of our Annual Fundraiser (starting in November), Wikimedia is
undertaking a survey of donors and potential donors in order to improve
the effectiveness and efficiency of fundraising efforts of the Wikimedia
Foundation. The results from this survey will help us to better
understand donors and potential donors, and ultimately, will help to
increase donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. There are several basic
questions the survey is intended to answer:

* Who donates to the Wikimedia Foundation? What characteristics do
donors to the Wikimedia Foundation share?
* Are there different types of donors that can be segmented by common
characteristics?
* What motivates individuals to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation?
* What expectations do donors have about how their donations are used?
* What would (or how can Wikimedia) motivate current donors to increase
their contributions?
* Why don't more individuals donate to the Wikimedia Foundation?
* What is likely to motivate non-donors to become donors?

You can find the survey process, timeline, methodology, & questions
here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_Survey_2009

We would appreciate your input on the questions and how to make this
survey as effective as possible.

-Rand

--
Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation
www.wikimedia.org
Email: rand at wikimedia.org
Phone: 415.839.6885 x615
Fax: 415.882.0495
Cell: 510.685.7030

[thekohser]

What a complete mess.

[Somey]

What a complete mess.

Yeah, but your suggestions sound like... you know, work.

Wikipedia is supposed to be fun!

Fun fun fun! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

[Kelly Martin]

Honestly, this looks like someone read a magazine article that said that they should have a donor survey, and so they threw one together after following directions they got out of a Crackerjack box.

[MZMcBride]

Is there some sort requirement that pages at Meta be overly long, sporadically boldfaced, and entirely unreadable? Good grief.

[EricBarbour]

Well, Brother McBride, why don't you call up one of the Golden Shower Experts
in the San Francisco office (specifically Mr. Montoya), and see if you can get
some coherent explanation? Report back if it makes a drop of sense.

Good luck, you'll need it. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/angry.gif)

And as Greg pointed out to the only person who responded (a Twinkle-running vandal fairy)--
the whole idea is already a failure, because the only commentor was Greg.
And the response?

I wouldn't say that community input has failed, merely that meta is a small wiki with a small community; many of whom might simply be uninterested in this topic. I'd still advise that if you think the process needs help to offer it. What's two hours in the grand scheme of the universe after all? It wouldn't be time wasted anyway; it might serve as a starting point for discussions on the next iteration of the survey. I agree that a scientific methodology would certainly lead to results that are unimpeachable. Personally, my expertise in survey design and statistics is medically based, not fund-raising. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif) fr33kman t - c 20:23, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

You interfered with his Jimbo-chant, Greg. Boo hoo.

[thekohser]

Well, Brother McBride, why don't you call up one of the Golden Shower Experts
in the San Francisco office (specifically Mr. Montoya)...

I already left a voicemail message for Montoya yesterday afternoon, so we'll see if he's responsive to my offer to help or not.

Greg

[thekohser]

I think that I've about wrapped up my work on restructuring the survey so that it will most meaningfully capture data that informs the Wikimedia Foundation about its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the contribution fundraising category.

A wiki is a horrible way to collaboratively design a survey questionnaire. If there had been other participants working as frequently as I in this process, we would have had edit conflicts galore, and there would not be the sense of continuity (of wording, of scales, etc.) that is so helpful for a respondent taking a survey. Fortunately, though, I was virtually a lone voice acting on this task -- despite trying to publicize it here, here, and here, a fruitless salvo. Now that I'm mentioning it here, though, I imagine my hard work will get the work-over and be torn to shreds.

I hope that you all will appreciate my "in-survey quiz" about the personnel of the WMF. It's not a joke -- rather, my attempt to gauge just how "in tune" is the Wikimedia project "community" with who actually runs the joint. I suspect the majority will think that Jimmy Wales or "Don't know" are the Executive Director and Chair of the Board of Trustees.

[Kelly Martin]

A wiki is a horrible way to collaboratively design a survey questionnaire.

A wiki is a horrible way to collaboratively design anything.

I suspect that wikis have about run their useful life. They work ok when you have an already close-knit group of people who already have internalized conflict management strategies. If you don't have such strategies in your working group, though, a wiki will just amplify those conflicts, without providing any sort of framework to focus such conflicts toward resolution.

Most successful wikis, from what I've seen, allow editing only by people who are already a part of the working group, and that working group already has a track record of successful collaboration. Either that, or they're just being used as a content engine, a role for which any number of other products would do just as well.

[thekohser]

This weekend, Jeff Pilisuk ("Marketing guru, eco-entrepreneur, social media junkie, health fanatic, coffee addict, and all around good-guy", according to his Twitter page), using an IP address, accepted and (presumably) copied as "final" about 90% of my version of the Fundraising Survey.

Pretty amazing that a formerly banned troll would be given the reins in almost single-handedly guiding and massaging such an important research initiative. Thank you, Meta, for being the Wikimedia backwater that you are!

This post has been edited by thekohser:

[MBisanz]

This weekend, Jeff Pilisuk ("Marketing guru, eco-entrepreneur, social media junkie, health fanatic, coffee addict, and all around good-guy", according to his Twitter page), using an IP address, accepted and (presumably) copied as "final" about 90% of my version of the Fundraising Survey.

Pretty amazing that a formerly banned troll would be given the reins in almost single-handedly guiding and massaging such an important research initiative. Thank you, Meta, for being the Wikimedia backwater that you are!

So, in other words, they used your valuable knowledge about marketing and business to get a professional survey for free.

[Kelly Martin]

So, in other words, they used your valuable knowledge about marketing and business to get a professional survey for free.

Well, there's some small hope that a properly-written survey will convince them that they have to do something about the cesspit that is Wikipedia if they want to see an increase in donations.

[thekohser]

So, in other words, they used your valuable knowledge about marketing and business to get a professional survey for free.

Well, there's some small hope that a properly-written survey will convince them that they have to do something about the cesspit that is Wikipedia if they want to see an increase in donations.

Yes, and bigger yes.

[dtobias]

Pretty amazing that a formerly banned troll would be given the reins in almost single-handedly guiding and massaging such an important research initiative. Thank you, Meta, for being the Wikimedia backwater that you are!

The input of critics can be extremely useful in such a project, where the aim is to try to appeal to people outside their normal circles.

[thekohser]

Until today, I didn't know that Henrik's Traffic-o-Meter tool was able to measure within the Meta project space.

So, it's rather interesting to see the June 2009 traffic and the July 2009 traffic (especially after July 6th, when I discovered the Fundraising Survey page and announced it here).

In a nutshell, this is what it looks like when one paid WMF Staff member and one non-paid WMF volunteer "coordinator" get together and launch and barely promote the fact that a should-be-important survey about fundraising characteristics is about to take place. Then, post July 6th, you see the impact of one non-paid agitator/expert calling attention to the discussion and practically single-handedly re-designing and re-writing it.

Kind of makes me wonder.

[thekohser]

For 2010, it looks like Rand Montoya tried a new approach to survey design:

Let a consultancy called SeaChange work behind the scenes, write the whole thing offline, then get a lackey to paste it into Meta, a fait accompli, with no significant discussion (one ignored suggestion), since you've banned all of those who are interested in its content.

[thekohser]

Maybe Rand Montoya would still have a job if he would have worked a little harder and listened to me a lot more.

[Zoloft]

Maybe Rand Montoya would still have a job if he would have worked a little harder and listened to me a lot more.

Looks more like 'rat-leaving-sinking-ship' rather than a dismissal.

[thekohser]

Kind of amusing how my well-wishes for Rand didn't draw a single comment from the Hive members. I guess they're learning not to poke.

[MZMcBride]

Kind of amusing how my well-wishes for Rand didn't draw a single comment from the Hive members. I guess they're learning not to poke.

That thread is eerily quiet; there are only two replies to the announcement total. That, combined with the message of the announcement, probably says something about someone.