Wikimedia Apps/Team/Android/Private Donor Recognition Experiment

As part of the Android team’s 2024/2025 Annual Plan, the Android team will explore various ways to increase the number of donations via touchpoints outside the annual banner and email appeals per platform. This project page documents the Android team’s experimentation related to the Wikimedia Foundation 2024-2025 Annual Plan, specifically the Wiki Experiences 3.2 Key Result.

Current Status

• 2024-10-2: sharing hypothesis and designs
• Next: community consultation and in-app feedback to test wikis and regions

Summary

Based on feedback and data, our focus is on increasing the number of donations beyond the methods the Foundation has relied upon in the past, specifically the annual banner appeals. We want to show that by investing in more integrated donor experiences, we can sustain our work and expand our impact by providing an alternative to donors and potential donors that are unresponsive to banner appeals.

Our existing donors would like to be recognized for their contributions and receive a tailored approach to engagement. Our current experiences, beyond email, fail to differentiate from existing recurring donors, one time donors, and potential donors.

Additionally we do not associate donor status with user names. We have an opportunity to learn if recognizing current and potential donors for their contributions, much like what we offer editors, would offer value to our users and if it opens the ability for more intentional campaigns thus it is worth investing in a cross platform system.

Background

Wiki Experiences 3: Consumer experience (Reading & Media)

Under the Wikimedia Foundation's Infrastructure Goal, and within the group of objectives focused on Wiki Experiences, is an objective related to improving the experience of consumers:

Wiki Experiences 3: Consumer experience Objective: A new generation of consumers arrives at Wikipedia to discover a preferred destination for discovering, engaging, and building a lasting connection with encyclopedic content.

Wiki Experiences 3.1 (WE3.1) Key Result: 50% increase in the number of donations via touchpoints outside the annual banner and email appeals per platform.

Several Wikimedia Foundation teams are committed to working on projects under the WE3.2 Key Result: Draft_Hypotheses.

Android team hypothesis	Timeline	Phabricator epic
Wiki Experiences 1.2.3: If we update the contributions page in the app to include an active badge for someone that is an app donor and display an inactive state with a prompt to donate for someone that decided not to donate in app, we will learn if this recognition is of value to current donors and encourages behavior of donating for prospective donors, informing if it is worth expanding on the concept of private donor badges or abandoning it.	Oct 1 2024 - December 31, 2024	T376303

Wikimedia Foundation teams are approaching annual planning more iteratively this year, so rather than committing to larger year-long projects, this hypothesis is fairly narrow in scope. This should allow us to learn from a brief experiment and deliver value in smaller increments throughout the year, while also ensuring we have the flexibility to pivot as we learn.

Designs

• 
  Initial screen (Donor)
• 
  Initial screen (Not a donor/unknown)
• 
  Overflow menu
• 
  Logged-out dashboard
• 
  Donor history unknown
• 
  Donor history (donor=yes)
• 
  Logged-in dashboard
• 
  Survey ask

Measurement and Results

How will we know we were successful?

The team is planning to run an experiment for 20 days to evaluate our hypothesis, along with running a survey to understand user satisfaction and feedback. We will validate our hypothesis for the experiment groups with the key indicators and guardrails below.

Validation

Current and Prospective Donors

• Badge interaction rate
• High rate of feature acceptance and desire for permanence
• Number of donations as a result of feature

Current Donors

• Share information about themselves with us
• Repeat donation rate

Prospective Donors

• Conversion rate of donors as a result of inactive state

Guardrails:

• Rate of negative sentiments by in-app users
• Rate of negative sentiments by community members

Curiosities:

• Is there alternative placement we should consider than the contributions dashboard?
• Does showing the edit tab to logged out users result in more account activations?
• Are people who saw feature AND banner showing different results than those that did not see it?
• Do users convey frustration with sharing their information as opposed to us already having access?

After conducting data analysis we will share the results of the experiment on this page, and in partnership with the community determine if there should be further investment and rerelease of content suggestions or if we should scale another hypothesis instead.

Technical Constraints

• Unable to get cross platform donations
• Unable to know insights if users donate via web
• The app cannot know whether the user has made donations in the past, or what amounts they were.
• If the user signs up for a recurring donation through the app, and then later cancels it (which is done outside of the app), the app won't be able to know about it.
• If the user uninstalls and reinstalls the app, or clears the app's data, their local contribution history will be lost.
• If the user logs in on another device, their contribution history will be empty.

Updates

Weekly updates can be found on our main updates page.