Fundraising/2023-24 Report

Wikipedia only exists because of the contributions of thousands of volunteers and the generosity of our donors. The Wikimedia Foundation is sustained by our unique grassroots fundraising model, with over 8 million donors giving an average donation of $10.58 in the 2023-2024 fiscal year (FY 23-24) – that’s 8 million people who have actively chosen to financially support our mission to provide free and fair access to knowledge for all. In FY 23-24, which began July 2023, the Foundation ran campaigns in 33 countries, 18 languages, and received donations from over 200 countries.

The majority of funding for the Wikimedia Foundation is generated by a large number of small dollar donors in multiple countries around the world. It’s a yearly reminder of what is possible when people from all walks of life decide to support a common goal. These donations allow us to support more than 25 billion monthly pageviews, maintain the technical infrastructure of 14 collaborative free knowledge projects, including Wikipedia, and strengthen our incredible volunteer communities. Beyond our necessary technical work, contributions from our donors enable us to defend our projects and communities against growing external threats, such as disinformation and harmful government regulation.

This year’s report shares insights from the Foundation's reader-supported fundraising program, trends, and learnings from engaging millions of donors around the world. The report highlights how the Foundation and Wikimedia volunteers worked together on various fundraising campaigns in FY23-24, and how the Fundraising team plans to further this collaboration to strengthen the Wikimedia mission long-term. We also indicate how donors have significantly contributed to recent improvements we have made in our fundraising efforts, not only through their gifts but through the invaluable insights shared through ongoing feedback. Finally, this report highlights how the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising program is continuing to diversify streams of revenue to ensure our strategy remains sustainable, particularly as we adapt to changing trends in the world around us and take a longer view toward the future. To learn more about Wikimeida’s financial model and revenue strategy, please see the FY 24-25 annual plan.

Thank you to all of the readers, donors and volunteers who make Wikipedia and its sister projects possible – you are proof of what can happen when millions of people around the world come together for good.

Note: All amounts are rounded in USD. Anonymous donations and donations made offline, totaling $2.5M, are not included in the continent-specific breakdowns.

$170.5 million USD raised from over 17.4 million donations

Our fundraising revenue increased by 0.51% from the previous fiscal year. You can read more about our continued modest budget growth in the Foundation Annual Plan.

Note: All amounts expressed in millions and rounded in USD.

Our average donation size decreased to $10.05 USD from $11.38 in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. This reflects our team’s efforts to make giving accessible to a wider range of readers who want to support our mission, inviting donors to give what they can, even if it’s less than the year before. It also reflects the global reach of our program; as we expand fundraising in places like India and Latin America, our asks tend to be lower to reflect local purchasing power. Finally, the decrease in average donation size is also influenced by the increase in recurring donations, which are typically smaller than a one-time gift.

Note: All amounts rounded in USD.

The Wikimedia Foundation is primarily funded by individual readers from around the world. During our annual appeals, visitors to Wikipedia will sometimes be greeted by a fundraising message that appears as a ‘banner’ on their screen inviting them to support the Wikimedia Foundation. These banners are traditionally the biggest source of revenue for our annual budget, and comprised 35% of all revenue in FY2324.

Example of a fundraising appeal shown on Wikipedia on desktop / laptop devices

In addition to helping us raise our annual budget, banners are a key tool to spread the word about our mission and grassroots fundraising model, as many donors tell us that they value learning more about the Wikimedia Foundation through the links and banners on their screens. Our banners are also our most important means of new donor acquisition, as the majority of donors start as readers finding value from the articles they encounter on Wikipedia.

The goal of our banner program is to generate a portion of the necessary revenue to meet our overall annual target, as outlined in the annual plan. This plan is discussed with volunteers, published on-wiki, and approved by the Board. While raising funds through banners, we also aim to minimize the impact on the reading experience. To achieve this, we implement banner impression limiting for all our campaigns; rely on user testing and research to better understand how to improve banner experience; and run hundreds of tests each year to optimize the key metrics of banner donation rate, average gift and, recently, recurring acquisition. The more efficient each banner impression is, the fewer we need to serve to hit our goal.

Some of the standout innovations we introduced in FY2324 include:

• The inclusion of Wikimedia Foundation branding in every banner, so it’s clearer to readers and donors that their gifts support our global nonprofit organization
• Innovations in encouraging donors to consider the powerful impact of making a recurring gift, like this simple Sustain our mission long term element:

The new ‘overlay’ format for our our primary mobile banner

This year also marks a historic first, in that we saw higher revenue from mobile banners compared to desktop. As readership continually moves from desktop-first to our mobile-centric world, our team has invested a lot of time in improving the mobile banner user experience.

Through methodical testing and with input from the Wikipedia Product Design team, we adopted a new overlay format for our ‘mobile large’ banner (see screenshot) that provides multiple means of closing the banner and easier access to the ‘Email me later’ and ‘I already donated’ features. These banners prominently feature mobile-friendly payment methods, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay, and our new integration of Venmo continues our trend of prioritizing payment methods that reduce friction for donors giving on their mobile devices.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, collaboration is a pillar of everything we do. In FY 23-24, the Foundation collaborated with Wikimedia volunteers, and we are committed to continuously improving our fundraising efforts together in support of our mission.

The team worked with volunteers on local language wiki collaboration spaces, virtual calls, in-person volunteer events, and in other forums. Here are a few campaign highlights from collaboration with volunteers:

• We introduced language around the role of Wikipedia in relation to AI to our banners. This theme also aligned with a wider Wikimedia social media campaign that ran concurrently under the headline ‘Knowledge is human,’ providing a consistent and timely message for our audience.
• Donors also saw an invitation to start editing on the Thank You page, after they donated. This led to 4,398 new account creations, and 441 of those accounts went on to constructively edit within 24 hours (a constructive edit means the edit wasn’t subsequently reverted within 48 hours). We continue to explore pathways between donating and editing
• We worked around the concept of time sensitivity to encourage readers to donate now rather than later.
• We increased clarity that the messages come from WMF by adding our organizational logo to all banners.
• We made it easier for readers to stop seeing banners for example by increasing the duration for which a reader could dismiss banners for.

Volunteers from around the world gave their time to discuss their own unique context and insight, ranging from how to provide a strong local payment experience to the best ways to translate our messages for a local audience. To provide a quality experience to our global readers, it’s important to develop appeals considering linguistic and cultural nuances. We translate our best-performing messages from English to 25 languages or modify the messages we use for different cultural contexts. Affiliates often made up a key part of this process – working to provide localization expertise and also bring others to the table. We actively monitor and balance donor, reader, and volunteer feedback to develop and adapt messaging. This collaboration paid off. In FY23-24, we received 76% fewer complaints about banner persistence through Zendesk, our donor feedback system compared to two years ago. Additionally, negative feedback messages from readers and volunteers on frequently visited pages like the Helpdesk, the Teahouse, Village Pumps, and the fundraising meta page decreased by 75%.

The fundraising team is grateful to everyone who worked together with them on these campaigns, and we look forward to strengthening collaboration in the year to come.

If you would like to help translate fundraising messages or participate in localizing the donor experience, please email fr-localization@wikimedia.org to get involved.

Email is our critical off-Wiki fundraising channel, as it accounts for 18.6% of our total fundraising revenue. Our emails raise millions of dollars a year through personalized interactions with readers who have either made a gift before or expressed an interest in donating. Building relationships and engaging past donors to continue their support has been an important part of the strategy to diversify revenue streams beyond banners on Wikipedia to strengthen the sustainability of the fundraising program. In our campaigns, we typically seek to kick off the fundraising campaign with strong customized email appeals ahead of the main banner campaign on Wikipedia. Crucially, email also gives us more space to show gratitude to donors, celebrate the work of volunteers, inform readers of alternate ways to give, and explain why donations are important to sustaining Wikipedia and our wider movement.

Thank You email sent to donors

In our email program, we focus on testing different approaches with different audiences. As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation’s emails regularly perform above industry benchmarks. Every year, we edit each email based on performance data, insights from our in-house team and our wider community, as well as feedback from our donors collected in surveys, focus groups, usability testing and through inbound messages. For example, in FY23-24 our volunteers encouraged us to clearly explain what the Wikimedia Foundation does, and readers have had the same request. As part of our response, we’ve introduced a module responding to the question ‘What is the Wikimedia Foundation?’ in the very first email of the campaign to help our readers and donors better understand our work.

Email content describing the Wikimedia Foundation and the work it does

Campaign emails are only sent to donors who have opted-in, and people are able to easily unsubscribe from receiving emails. As part of our commitment to transparency, the team shares banners and emails on Meta and on local language Wikipedias prior to each campaign.

As a result of our thorough optimization strategy, the Wikimedia Foundation’s emails consistently perform above industry benchmarks.

Industry benchmarks are from 2024 M+R nonprofit benchmarks

Recurring donors are people who give to the Wikimedia Foundation on a monthly basis. Recurring donations represent a growing proportion of our financial model, providing a stable source of year-round funding that allows us to plan for the future. Building the recurring program has been a priority of the team to develop long-term donor relationships to support a more resilient program. In FY23-24, our recurring program saw remarkable revenue growth of 17% year-over-year. This increase is partly the result of diligent efforts to introduce recurring donations in new regions such as the Czech Republic and Latin America, as well as to improve the experience of existing recurring donors.

To ensure our recurring program continues to grow and remains sustainable, we have made several enhancements to the recurring user journey. Our landing page targeting potential monthly donors features quotes from existing supporters and clear information to help readers see the benefits of a recurring gift. At various points throughout the year, we also invite one-time donors to become monthly donors, and we include appeals to ‘Become a monthly donor’ in our banner campaign.

Example of a monthly donation prompt

We launched a ‘Thank You’ campaign in January among our active and lapsed recurring donors, offering active donors a discount on Wikipedia merchandise, and encouraging lapsed donors to reactivate their support. Finally, we have begun work to make it easier for donors to change their monthly contributions in order to provide more flexibility for those who wish to continue giving.

Visitors to the Wikipedia portal may also be shown fundraising appeals. In FY23-24, we revised the design and position of the portal banners to incorporate more messaging within an updated design. By placing the banner at the bottom of the page, the main function of the portal page was not obscured. Portal banners were primarily shown during the English campaign.

Example of a portal banner

The Wikipedia Android and iOS apps are used by some of our most loyal readers, and they reach nearly 6 million monthly active users in total. Last fiscal year, the app and fundraising teams implemented Apple Pay and Google Pay for users to easily donate via the Wikipedia apps. This has proven to be a major convenience for our donors, making the payment process more familiar and straightforward.

Example of Android App Banner

Our donation systems and infrastructure enable supporters to make millions of small gifts from around the world. We are constantly working to optimize the fundraising process and make giving more seamless for readers who wish to donate, while maintaining our industry-leading standards for protecting the privacy of our supporters. This requires both large and incremental changes to the user experience to ensure the donation process meets the needs and expectations of different audiences.

Fundraising in new markets gives more readers the opportunity to give back to Wikipedia. In FY23-24, we launched our first ever fundraiser in Greece and built upon the successful launch of fundraising in the Czech Republic in the previous year.

In FY 23-24, we added the option to pay by Venmo in the US to make giving for younger audiences more accessible. We have also introduced ACH and SEPA payments in the US and EU respectively, to enable donors in these regions to donate directly via their bank account. To provide further payment options, we rolled out a new Donor Advised Fund and Stock Platform which means that donors seeking to make donations through these mechanisms can now do so in a matter of minutes. These examples highlight a handful of the technical updates we have made to make donating to the Wikimedia Foundation as simple and straightforward as possible.

Staff working in support of the Major Gifts and Endowment programs build long-term personal relationships with donors with the goal of securing support both for Wikimedia’s immediate and long-term needs. Through customized cultivation strategies, impact reports, newsletters, and in-person and virtual meetings and events, we help bring the Foundation and the Endowment’s work alive for donors.

In FY23-24, major donors contributed $19.1 million USD to the Foundation. This includes almost 2,000 people who gave gifts of over $1,000 USD, while the remainder was made up of contributions from donor-advised funds, payroll deductions, and other donation methods that fall under major gifts. Many donors choose to be recognized on our Benefactors page, which is a public expression of gratitude for those donors who have supported the Wikimedia Foundation.

Gifts from major donors are a key part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s revenue strategy, and we expect our major giving targets to increase in the coming years. The vast majority of major gifts are unrestricted donations to the Foundation’s general operating fund. A small number of purpose-restricted donations were made this year. Restricted donations help donors make a specific impact on our mission and give an opportunity for them to feel a meaningful and transformative connection to our work. Highlights of restricted donations this year include continued support from the Rockefeller Foundation and Google.org for the development of Abstract Wikipedia.

More than 80,000 gifts were made through corporate philanthropic programs this past year. In these matching gifts, volunteer match, payroll deduction programs, and Combined Federal Campaigns, employers match employees’ individual gifts to the Wikimedia Foundation, doubling or even tripling the original donation amount. These programs are relatively common at large US-based companies.

The Wikimedia Endowment is our long-term commitment to ensuring everyone has free access to knowledge that is accurate, relevant and useful. Launched in 2016, the Wikimedia Endowment's purpose is to provide lasting financial support to Wikimedia projects. As of June 30, 2024, the Wikimedia Endowment was valued at $144 million USD.

The Wikimedia Endowment is an investment fund, which means that the Endowment’s monies are invested in financial markets. A portion of the gains from the Wikimedia Endowment's investments is reinvested to grow the Endowment over time, and a portion of the fund is used to cover the Endowment's operational costs and provide funding for Wikimedia projects, in accordance with the spending policy.

In FY23-24, the Wikimedia Endowment completed its transition to an independent 501(c)(3) charitable organization, added new board members, and gave out its second round of grants to support technical innovation on the Wikimedia projects. The Endowment’s grantmaking is focused on technical innovation and funds projects that will help Wikipedia stay relevant and thrive in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

This year, we launched a second multi-year fundraising campaign that will allow the Endowment to return even greater support for Wikimedia projects for years to come. This campaign will guide our fundraising efforts for the coming decade.

More than 450,000 donors gave a total of $14 million to the Wikimedia Endowment this year, via a variety of methods — including direct donations, realized bequests from individuals who left gifts to Wikimedia in their wills, and through other planned giving methods. Throughout the year, about 370 people and institutions made gifts of $1,000 USD or more to the Wikimedia Endowment.

Planned giving is a key part of the Endowment’s current campaign and our long term strategy, as it allows us to collect pledges for future donations, most commonly through gifts in wills and beneficiary designations. The Wikimedia Endowment has partnered with FreeWill, a free online tool to create a legal will in the United States, and also provides donors with informational resources to make it easy for those who wish to make a legacy gift to the Endowment. This year, 481 people made planned gift commitments.

Many of our Endowment donors choose to be recognized on the Endowment website’s Benefactors page or as members of the Wikipedia Legacy Society.

Wikipedia is built by people for people, so listening to our wide and varied audience is central to fulfilling our mission. In FY23-24, the Donor Relations team responded to 173,500 donor and supporter inquiries from 110 countries in 30 languages. A portion of these supporters reached out to us to express their gratitude for Wikipedia, tell us more about why they decided to support our mission, and suggest ways we could improve in the future. We are glad to share some of these comments from readers around the world below:

The Netherlands: "It is an honour to be able to contribute to Wikipedia, which I always try to refer to as the eighth wonder of the world."

Sent in English.

US: "For most of my life, an encyclopedia was an expensive luxury, and not nearly as accessible as the knowledge provided by Wikimedia. Even with the demurral that nothing finite can answer all questions, Wikipedia goes a long way toward making knowledge of human-accessible wisdom available to the greatest number of humans. I wish my income allowed me to do more. Thank you for all you do."

Malaysia: "Keep spreading the light of knowledge to reduce the darkness of ignorance."

Australia: "My Mum died last month. She had Alzheimer’s. She used to try to remember things in her past, or have a fragment of poetry or the tune of a song jump into her mind, and she would look at my phone and say “put that in your machine” and she would eagerly wait for the answer. We had such fun. Wikipedia will always be part of my memories of my kind, cheeky beloved Mum. I miss her so much. Thank you Jimmy and all the wonderful people on your team."

Brazil: "Thank you to you, who always helped me see the world with different eyes."

Spain: "Oh, one of my schoolboy dreams was to someday have an encyclopedia in my pocket. Now in my seventies it's done! Thanks!!!"

Sent in English.

India: "Thanks to you and the many behind all the contributions and uptaking of the site, you have been a staple source of information to billions around the world. It’s become a sacred treasure for people globally that must be preserved."

US: "Thank you for filling my childhood with wonder and my adulthood with answers. I hope to preserve that for the next generation of kids."

Thank you for reading our annual fundraising report. Please visit the talk page for any questions or to leave comments about the report. We are happy to share information about fundraising at the Wikimedia Foundation and look forward to your feedback. We will respond to comments and questions to the best of our ability.

The amounts listed in this fundraising report do not conform to the US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and differ from revenue reported in our Independent Auditors’ Report and Internal Revenue Service Form 990 Tax Return. This report reflects the value of gifts at the point the donation was made. Many currencies in the world significantly decreased in value relative to the U.S. dollar in 2022 and this may also lead to differences in the value of assets listed in our Independent Audit report and form 990. Lastly, the figures represented from prior years may exclude canceled donations.