2012 Wikimedia fundraiser/status

Last update on: 2013-07-monthly

2012-02-29
Adding support for recurring GlobalCollect donations was the primary engineering focus in February, with work on this functionality carrying over into March. Several deployments were made to the payments cluster to better our form localization in several countries in Africa. A subset of those forms were used in a week-long banner and landing page test that also ran in February. A great deal of effort was expended in February in the name of building out the team by two more people; The search for new fundraising engineers is ongoing.

2012-03-31
The team continued to work on GlobalCollect recurring donations, with the code review remaining to be done. They also engaged in cleanup after an eventually successful upgrade of our production instance of CiviCRM from 3.4 to 4.1.1, the migration to git, and Mingle training. There was an issue with an imbalance of chargebacks, due to a spinning down of the Winter fundraising flagging fraud in GlobalCollect, that was resolved.

2012-04-monthly
The fundraising team deployed GlobalCollect recurring functionality, and started transition to using Git and Gerrit for its software development process. They wrote the burn up chart for the next fundraising round. The team is still working on adding staff.

2012-05-monthly
The fundraising team developed and deployed new filters to help identify and stop fraudulent transactions. In addition, the team made employment offers to two candidates that were accepted. The new staff will be integrated to the team, which will be fully staffed before Wikimania.

2012-06-monthly
Onboarded Adam Wight to the team. GlobalCollect recurring is now code complete (now in code review). Integrated with Yandex through GlobalCollect. Finished migration of payments deployment to Git.

2012-07-27
We onboarded Matt Walker to the team. Progress was made on enhancements to CiviCRM that enable Finance and other departments to get relevant metrics and reports more easily. Katie Horn traveled to Wikimania and gave a presentation about the fundraising infrastructure.

More details: 
 * Sprint 5 - A new fiscal year
 * Sprint 6 - Hello Matt, and Wikimania!
 * Sprint 7 - Auditing and Reconciliation

2012-07-monthly
We onboarded Matt Walker to the team. Progress was made on enhancements to CiviCRM that enable Finance and other departments to get relevant metrics and reports more easily. Katie Horn traveled to Wikimania and gave a presentation about the fundraising infrastructure.

2012-08-monthly
The fundraising team completed 3 very successful sprints, completing more work in each sprint than some of the previous sprints combined (Sprint 7: Auditing and Reconciliation; Sprint 8: Amazon, and a bunch of other random stuff; and Sprint 9: Adyen, Amazon wrap-up, and Listeners). During the sprints, the team integrated with Amazon Payments, added features to CiviCRM to enable the settlement of donations in multiple currencies, added features (including the beginning of an API) and made bugfixes to CentralNotice, discovered and dealt with an issue in the global credit card processing system, and began integration on a new payment processor that will give the fundraising team access to additional payment methods around the world. 

2012-09-monthly
<section begin="2012-09-monthly"/>Throughout September the team worked toward the October 1st fundraising code slush refactoring a few existing payment processors and integrating with Adyen. The Adyen integration will give the fundraiser credit processor redundancy as well as reduce the percentage of each donation lost to processing fees. In addition, the team worked to integrate the Translation extension during a sprint with the Internationalization team and made many other, smaller bug fixes and enhancements for the upcoming 2012 fundraiser. <section end="2012-09-monthly"/>

2012-10-monthly
<section begin="2012-10-monthly"/>Throughout October, the Fundraising Engineering team has been working on the final engineering push before the kickoff of the 2012 fundraiser in November. During testing, performance regressions were noticed across many wikis and geographies. The team, with support from many other groups, has identified and is attempting to resolve these issues to enhance not only fundraising, but the overall user experience on Wikimedia sites.<section end="2012-10-monthly"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>November has been a busy month for Fundraising as the team helped to kick-off the annual 2012 fundraiser on November 26th with heavy testing before then. So far the 2012 fundraiser has been a resounding success raising over $12M in the 5 full days and limited testing days since November 15th. For current information, see the live stats. Shortly before the full launch, it was announced that the annual fundraiser would be splitting into an English-language fundraiser in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and New Zealand during the traditional November/December period with other languages and all countries in April. For more details see the [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122811.html announcement on wikimedia-l].<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2012-12-monthly
<section begin="2012-12-monthly"/>The 2012 annual fundraiser continued in December and was a resounding success. In addition to the ongoing maintenance required to operate the fundraiser, the team helped to execute the Thank You campaign and started to put into place new tools for auditing the fundraiser after its completion.<section end="2012-12-monthly"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>January marks the official end of the 2012 fundraiser. The team spent the entirety of the month cleaning up and recovering from the very successful months of November and December, auditing the donations, and writing tools that will help the team run continuous auditing in the future.<section end="2013-01-monthly"/>

2013-02-monthly
<section begin="2013-02-monthly"/>The majority of February was spent paying down the more glaring examples of technical debt we acquired during the 2012 English fundraiser, before jumping straight into a whole new round of International fundraising that kicked off on February 27th at approximately 15:00 UTC (7am PST). Due to unforeseen problems with one of our payment gateways, we were forced to scrap our plans for a continuous international fundraising effort spanning March through June, and will instead attempt to raise as much of the remaining budget in March as we are able. All other plans have been precluded by the March fundraising efforts.<section end="2013-02-monthly"/>

2013-03-monthly
<section begin="2013-03-monthly"/>In March, we wrapped up our 2012/13 non-English international fundraising efforts, making approximately 5 million USD over the course of the month. Originally, we had planned to run the non-English international fundraiser continuously until June, but were forced to accelerate our plans due to some potential instability at the beginning of April with one of our crucial payment gateways. At the very end of March, we started publishing aggregate public fundraising data to samarium.wikimedia.org.<section end="2013-03-monthly"/>

2013-04-monthly
<section begin="2013-04-monthly"/>The fundraising team deployed a public reporting site, made of aggregate live and historical fundraising data, which were notably used by the webcomic xkcd to dynamically change the outcome in the last panel of their 2013 April 1st comic, 'Externalities'. We also upgraded the payments- and fundraising- wikis to MediaWiki 1.22, upgraded CiviCRM to 4.2.8 and Drupal to 7, and migrated the banner impression log pipeline to the Eqiad data center.<section end="2013-04-monthly"/>

2013-05-monthly
<section begin="2013-05-monthly"/>The Operations team moved db1025 into the firewalled fundraising cluster (frack), rebuilt it on Precise with MariaDB. RAID monitoring tools were updated to support RAID controllers used in frack. We've mostly finished building/puppetizing the new payments listener (thulium) as well as a new CiviCRM host (barium), both of which are in frack.<section end="2013-05-monthly"/>

2013-06-monthly
<section begin="2013-06-monthly"/>The initial work on the Adyen payments gateway was finally completed and deployed to production, though we have not yet used the gateway in a campaign. Plans for a mobile fundraising campaign and workflow continued to move forward: We expect to do the first mobile-targeted campaign in mid to late July. Some last-minute tweaking was done to the payments cluster in preparation for the resumption of continuous fundraising on July 1, coinciding with the start of the fiscal year.

Payments listener (thulium) deploy was completed, db1013 was moved into the firewalled fundraising cluster and rebuilt as a fundraising QA server, and work continued on the new CiviCRM server (barium). Fundraising backups were overhauled.<section end="2013-06-monthly"/>

2013-07-monthly
<section begin="2013-07-monthly"/>In July, the fundraising team did its first successful tests of our new payments gateway: Adyen. The (as yet) US-only Credit Card backup gateway performed similarly to our primary credit card processor in A/B testing, and can be successfully used as a failover.

We also ran, for the first time, several short campaign tests targeted at mobile devices in the US. In these tests, users were able to choose between Paypal or Amazon Payments. Additional tests to determine peak times, appropriate localities, and optimum messaging for mobile campaigns will continue throughout August, as the campaigns are prepared. <section end="2013-07-monthly"/>