=== Design problem and prompt
In 2018, around 5 million people donated to support Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. Donating is a popular and necessary way for readers to contributor back to the movement; not everyone can be an editor. The online fundraising team has put considerable time into optimizing our campaign-focused banner appeals, but these typically run for only around 6 weeks out of the year. Many readers do not see these banners. There is a simple sidebar link to Donate on desktop, but it is easy to miss in a menu of unrelated items.
Please figure out a persistence way for people to support our mission thru monetary means, reducing the dependency on banner campaigns in the long run.
=== Description
In December 2018, during our annual English Campaign, the online fundraising team ran a short experiment via a CentralNotice banner to understand how donor conversion is impacted by increasing the visibility of desktop Wikipedia's sidebar //Donate to Wikipedia// link. Online Fundraising styled the link as a blue button:
{F28552775}
[[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidebar_(publishing)?banner=20181220_sidebar_blueButton | link to page ]]
And in our test, donations per impressions increased by 165%.
We're interested in further experimentation and discussion to answer some of the following questions:
1) How do results look in other countries and languages?
2) How is donor conversion affected over longer periods of time (our initial test ran for around 5 days)?
3) Does a more visible donate link decrease clicks on other sidebar or page elements?
4) Are there any community or foundation concerns about increasing the visibility of the link?