(The following is the exact content provided as feedback via post-donation survey. – ed)
While I admit the absolute right of an organization to make its own decisions about when and how to attempt to market to its users, attempting to sustain growth and cover expenses after the fact rather than before it is the only reason a financial crisis ever exists.
May I suggest spending a year analyzing what will be cut from operations, maintenance costs, etc?
May I then suggest you build a campaign around communicating EXACTLY the anticipated coming annual (or more tactically, the next five years) minimum capital and operational expenses?
(i.e., What do you/we stand to lose should you not get the funding you require? – ed.)
May I suggest next that you publicly call upon businesses and social organizations known to be primary beneficiaries of your work (as determined by the domains who access/use you most!!) to return in support their public valuation of your contribution to THEIR ongoing success?
You see, at minimum, everyone who uses this site does so because they gain a benefit, even if that benefit is only to believe, feel, and think that they can and will find what they wish to know or confirm within your sites.
Like any other human, we have a visceral and moderately emotional value that we assign to this product, this service, this convenience, this sense of confidence and trust that is held by your brand.
In all cases to date, you have relied upon tactics of guilt, shame, and nagging to acquire attention and funding of your needs.
I respectfully submit that it is only of late that a noticeable difference in positioning appears. At last, you appeal to the very thing that drives me (and likely most) to you – to consider our own experiences with you and attempt to set a value upon THEM, rather than to consider our consumption of your offerings as a tab, too long left open.
For tabs, look to those who clearly have funding for operations and its expenses. You must never seek money from those who turn to you for the security of knowledge you offer.
You must ever seek money from those who turn to you only to save themselves money; because only those who are doing so increasing your present and future growth needs.
I suspect you could actually struggle to stay non-profit were you simply to require MAC address assignments for any/all known commercial, for-profit domains and set them a monthly fee for TRAFFIC. Your personal account may be used anywhere, but if it doesn’t come from the MAC of your identified home devices, you are paying for it (self-securing ethics; companies will always pay, whether through their own funding or via the noble charity of their employees).
Perhaps my feedback is too blunt. But as you continue to ignore me as candidate for any of your product openings, I suppose this is as close as I’ll ever get to providing this level of concise (though verbosely complete) example of the vision I have for Wikipedia – in a world where corporatism’s increasingly disproportionate use raises costs for us all, there is one way to elegantly, eloquently keep “the scales” in alignment/balance.
TL;DR – I gave you money because you stopped trying to guilt me. Guilt and shame the corporations who abuse your free access to save themselves money and do not have funding tagged for you in their annual budgets and you will receive the funding you need to keep this free forever for us all. BELIEVE IN YOUR OWN NOBILITY AND WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER WHY YOU ARE NOBLE…. stay in touch with your WHY.