Annual Report 2022/Fail fest: Fundraising postponed

Möjliggörande

2022

I den här fail festen fokuserar vi på hur arbetet med insamling togs vidare på ett annat sätt än vad som var tänkt. Vår planerade F2F-kampanj fick skjutas på framtiden, men viktiga steg har tagits för att underlätta för insamlingskampanjer framåt.

In 2020, Telefonplan in Stockholm was one of the places where we recruited new donors. Many interested passers-by took a pause to listen to us and make a mobile donation.

We wanted to resume our work with F2F fundraising in 2022. F2F is a fundraising channel where our staff (and volunteers) are visible on city streets in order to engage people in conversation and share information about our work. This could lead to people signing up as donors or members of our association. We wanted to take the lessons from 2020 and 2021 further and develop an F2F campaign. However, due to staff shortages, we were not able to run this campaign in 2022 as planned. After some of our staff left, other staff members had to take over their tasks, and as a result, we put our plans for a F2F campaign on hold.

Planning and starting up an F2F campaign and hiring new recruiters is both time- and resource- consuming. That's why one of the things we prioritized instead was creating structures and tools for future fundraising campaigns. One of the tools we developed and tested was a set of scripts based on our projects and thematic areas. The choice of project or thematic area helped us decide where to place our staff, as we wanted to be where we believed people interested in the particular area of our work would pass by. The goal with testing the scripts was to develop some sort of idea of what what makes people join Wikimedia Sverige, and how best we can have a conversation to catch their interest and explain what we do. Another thing we hoped to learn from the tests was whether some of our projects were better suited for this than others, or whether it didn't affect the result in any way. We've been continuing this work for some time in 2023. One conclusion we reached after the tests was that many of the passers-by wanted to talk about Wikipedia and the relationship between editing and critical thinking. Many spontaneously mentioned WikiGap as well, even though we did not bring it up ourselves.

Another reason why the F2F campaign was postponed was that it's been taking us longer than expected to find a new CRM systemd. See the story: A new CRM system to learn about our work with fundraising and membership. However, having a CRM system in place can simplify both running a larger fundraising campaign in the future and the subsequent work of contacting and informing our members and donors about Wikimedia Sverige's work and about the different possibilities available to them.