User:RobLa/Fundraising

This document describes a potential fundraising strategy for Miraheze. It was initially conceived during the minutes from the March 12 Miraheze board meeting, with User:RobLa agreeing to followup. Then the global pandemic distracted everyone for a while, and threatens to throw us into a worldwide depression as deep as The Great Depression, which may have an effect on our fundraising strategy. TBD. This proposal is written under the assumption that things return to "normal" (whatever that was).

Conception
During the March 12 Miraheze board meeting, we discussed a few fundraising strategies, with User:RobLa agreeing to follow up on the conversation.

Quoting the the minutes:


 * RL proposed introducing targeted advertising based on resource usage (most resource intensive wikis have a different, more aggressive potentially, advertising campaign).
 * AP: RL to investigate tailoring campaigns to wikis based on resource usage –drafting up a potential campaign message for use.

User:RobLa intends to say more about this on the talk page so that he doesn't have to refer to himself in the third person.

Audience
User:RobLa believes that fundraising banners can be more effective if tailored to the audience receiving them. In the long-term, each wiki should be able to opt-in (or opt-out) of relatively aggressive fundraising banners (e.g. like Wikimedia Foundation has during their annual fundraising drives geared toward American users in December)

Per wiki fundraising
Ideally, the wikis that use the most should pay the most. But what does that mean?


 * Should the wikis that generate the most readers pay the most?
 * Should the wikis that generate the most database traffic pay the most?
 * Should the wikis that have the highest resource utilization pay the most?
 * Should the wikis that create the most legal liability for Miraheze pay the most?
 * Should the wikis that bother the Miraheze SRE team pay the most?
 * Should the wikis with the most affluent users pay more than wikis with less affluent users?

Clearly the answers to these questions are "yes", "no", "maybe" and "what? how do you measure that?", in no particular order. :-D All of these questions can be answered with some or all of the "yes/no/maybe/what?" answers.

Use
When saying "use the most should pay the most", what does "use" mean?
 * How much readers a "use" the site in ways they should pay for?
 * How much do wiki authors "use" the site in ways they should pay for?
 * How much do people that publish links to the site "use" the site?

Top ten wikis
As of 22:01, 17 April 2020 (UTC), these are the top 10 wikis in terms of "":


 * (fill me in)

Other wikis
In addition to the above, here are some other wikis to consider our fundraising strategy with.

Electowiki

 * main article: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Electowiki:Miraheze

User:RobLa has been an admin on the MediaWiki-based website "electowiki" since 2005. Electowiki migrated to Miraheze in 2018 (detailed extensively at https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa ), and he reports that he's grateful that the volunteer migration was done with almost no help from me until the end of the migration process.

Since users of https://electowiki.org are frequently not aware of Miraheze, and because many of the users are frequently solicited from other electoral reform organizations, they may not realize that donating to Miraheze is something that they can do to support the electoral reform movement.