Germany's largest online donation campaign is run by GRÜN VEWA manages

Wikimedia Germany - Society for the Promotion of Free Knowledge e. V. (WMDE) is the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of Wikipedia. Wikimedia Germany is financed almost exclusively through donations and membership fees. And with success: In the last 5 years the donations have increased tenfold and the number of members has increased to 24 times. All donors and members are completely included GRÜN VEWA manages.

Initial Situation

Wikipedia is currently the most widely used online reference work and is in the top 10 most visited websites worldwide. Financing is done exclusively through donations. The Wikimedia Foundation in the USA uses CiviCRM as donation software.

Wikimedia Germany runs the donation campaigns on Wikipedia in Germany. And with success: In Germany this is the most successful online donation campaign ever. A few years ago, the data acquisition and donor analysis were still managed with a database developed in-house. With the increasing success of the donation campaigns, it quickly became clear that this self-developed solution would quickly reach its limits. Since CiviCRM could not cover the specific requirements of a fundraising software, Wikimedia Germany decided on the German market leader GRÜN VEWA to manage its donors and members.

High volume of donations

Every year, donations are collected by Wikimedia - and with great success. The organization, which, apart from Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia France, is the only chapter to carry out donation campaigns outside the Wikimedia Foundation, runs Germany's largest online donation campaign and in 2013 processed over 400.000 donations with a donation volume of 7,8 million euros. During the large annual fundraising campaign alone, which takes place in November and December every year, 97% of the total donation income is collected.

Wikimedia now manages over 800.000 donor addresses in GRÜN VEWA, whereby the actual number of address data records is significantly higher, since the donations of tens of thousands of anonymous donors are recorded collectively.

Donations have increased tenfold in the last 5 years. Thanks to the extensive automation in GRÜN With the large number of donation data records, VEWA only needs very few administrative staff.

Automated donation management with GRÜN VEWA

The donation management takes place completely in GRÜN VEWA. Thanks to a series of automatisms, incoming donations are assigned directly to a data record:
  • In the case of transfers, a VEWA script checks the purpose of the bank transfer for a 5-digit number, the zip code. If this is available, further information on a street name is sought so that a data record can be intelligently extracted from the purpose of the transfer.
  • Wikimedia generates a WQ code, a multi-digit and unique combination of letters, on its website. If this WQ code is entered on the remittance slip as the purpose, the donation payment is automatically assigned to the corresponding address data record. The address of the donor was requested in advance when filling out the donation form.
  • Donors from the last few years are selected in VEWA and made aware of the current campaign by e-mail.
  • All donors who donate more than 15 euros to Wikimedia will automatically receive a donation receipt. The donors are selected in VEWA and sent directly to the lettershop. Over 100.000 receipts were automatically created and sent in 2013. Due to the increasing success, Wikimedia calculates a significant increase here every year.
  • With the introduction of GRÜN VEWA found a high number of duplicates, also through the integration of an additional phonetic check.

Analysis via the Business Intelligence Module (BIM)

Dozens of different banners and landing pages are displayed during the campaign. Tracking data such as the donation rate for the various banners and landing pages are recorded in VEWA and displayed in a visual way via BIM. Wikimedia uses the tracking data to analyze the distribution of donations. You can see at a glance which marketing measures were the most successful.

Wikimedia Germany continues to grow

Due to the awareness and popularity of Wikipedia and the fundraising and marketing successes of Wikimedia, the number of donations and membership fees is continuously increasing. While Wikimedia Germany still had 2010 members in 500, there are now over 10.000. At this point the choice was confirmed, GRÜN To use VEWA as a market-leading system because, thanks to the many automations, it is possible for Wikimedia to manage a significantly larger number of donors and members with only a few human resources. Germany's largest online campaign is initiated by Wikimedia Germany, which is becoming more successful every year. Also a success of GRÜN VEWA.

"If during the annual fundraising campaign over 300.000 donations and contributions in GRÜN VEWA is not unusual. Thanks to the software, we can handle the high volume of donations without any problems, as the degree of automation is continuously optimized. "

- Till Mletzko

Til Mletzko

Photo: Tobias Schumann, CC-BY-SA-3.0

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