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

The 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, regular donations have almost tripled and the number of members has doubled. All donors and members are completely involved GRÜN VEWA manages.

Wikimedia Deutschland eV is a non-profit organization committed to promoting free knowledge. Since it was founded in 2004, the association has supported various Wikimedia projects - above all Wikipedia. The association advocates free access to free knowledge and is therefore committed to a fundamental human right to education. Wikipedia, like other sister projects, is independent and ad-free and is only possible through voluntary work and donations.

Wikipedia is currently the most used online reference work and is in the top 10 most visited websites worldwide. Funding comes exclusively from donations. Wikimedia Germany runs the fundraising campaigns on Wikipedia in Germany. And with success: In Germany, this is the most successful online fundraising campaign ever. A few years ago, data collection and donor analysis was managed using a self-developed database. As the fundraising campaigns became increasingly successful, it quickly became clear that this self-developed solution would quickly reach its limits. Therefore, Wikimedia Germany chose GRÜN VEWA to manage their donors and members.

Every year, donations are collected by Wikimedia - and with great success. The organization, which is the only chapter alongside Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia France that is allowed to carry out fundraising campaigns outside of the Wikimedia Foundation, runs Germany's largest online donation campaign and processed over 2022 donations in 650.000 with a donation volume of almost 14 million euros. During the major annual donation campaign alone, which takes place every year in November and December, 97% of the total donation income is collected.

Wikimedia now manages over 800.000 donor addresses in GRÜN VEWA, although the actual number of address data records is significantly higher, as the donations of tens of thousands of anonymous donors are recorded collectively. In the last 5 years, donations have increased tenfold. Thanks to the extensive automation in GRÜN With the large number of donation data records, VEWA only needs very few administrative staff.

The donation management takes place completely in GRÜN VEWA. Thanks to a number of automatisms, incoming donations are directly assigned to a data record:

Wikimedia is continually improving the processes in VEWA. This allowed the online and offline donation processes to be significantly optimized.

Fundraising campaigns via banners on the Wikipedia website

Fundraising campaigns are promoted via a banner on the Wikipedia website. This banner redirects users to a specially generated online donation form, which contains a unique letter-number code, the WQ code. Donors enter this code manually in the intended purpose of their transfer.

Transfers imported into VEWA as donation commitments

The bank records incoming transfers, which are then imported into VEWA as donation commitments via the electronic account statement (ELKO). Thanks to the WQ code, transfers can be precisely assigned to an address master, an associated donation commitment and an open item after they have been received by the bank and the account statements have been imported into VEWA via ELKO. This is done by carefully comparing the IBAN, name and/or intended use, which also includes an extensive checking process with a confirmation field.

WQ code for optimization

ELKO can handle various special cases: It automatically recognizes umlauts and searches for the name and other relevant data for new or changed bank details in order to make suitable suggestions. It also corrects usage errors, such as an incorrect WQ code, by searching the database for similar matches. This search can be started using a special button “Determine similar WQ codes”. If someone uses an outdated WQ code, ELKO recognizes it and looks for the associated name or IBAN to ensure correct assignment.

Thanks to these process optimizations, Wikimedia was able to significantly improve donation management. The allocation rate of payments increased from 64% to 90%. The processing time for payments once received has been reduced to a maximum of 5 days. This allows online and offline donations to be processed more efficiently.

Due to the awareness and popularity of Wikipedia as well as Wikimedia's fundraising and marketing successes, the number of donations and membership contributions is continually increasing. While Wikimedia Germany still had 2013 members in 7.000, there are now over 107.000. On this point the choice was confirmed, GRÜN To use VEWA as a market-leading system because, thanks to the many automations, Wikimedia is able 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 Deutschland, which is becoming more successful every year. Also a success of GRÜN VEWA.