Wikipedia: how NOT to ask for donations

I'm an avid user of Wikipedia: it's a great source for a lot of relatively complete and unbiased information. It also has issues, I know, but I think it would be a great loss to society if we would lose access to it.

The above block appeared this week in my Wikipedia search result: it's a recurring (yearly?) theme for Wikipedia to ask for donations to keep their service up-and-running. Servers and staff are not free.

Unfortunately, the text in this block is a prime example of how NOT to use social proof (assuming that Wikipedia actually wants more donations, not less).

I have seen Wikipedia using this tactic the last couple of years but it won't work, or at least not in the way they might think it works and Wikipedia could actually make people open to donation to not place a donation.

Time to get this fixed!

Short explanation on why this text is counterproductive:

fewer than 2% give

The text gives a negative form of social proof. The rationale behind this is probably among the line of "if we show that almost no-one is donating to users that use our free service, we evoke a feeling of guilt and show that we really need their help".

Unfortunately, this is often not what your brain makes of this, which will be more among the line of "oh if 98% is not donating, it's gonna be fine if I'm not doing it either".

We are social animals. We look to others for what to do in many situations. If 98% is NOT donating, apparently that's the norm, so most people will follow that norm.

I'm not suggesting that Wikipedia should just twist/lie about the numbers like saying "98% of users donate" (although that would be an interesting experiment too). But there are other ways of framing this truthfully without showing negative social proof.

PS1: It's good to have deadlines (scarcity in time), but I have no idea why they need my help "this Thursday" and most users won't care about you being a non-profit and don't have sales people. Frame it in a way that speaks to the benefits of this to the person reading.

PS2: It's not all bad. Bonus points for personalizing for my country (The Netherlands) and the preferred payment method (iDEAL) in my country.

Some ideas (that should be validated before implementation):

• "On average our donors donate €XX,XX" (setting the social bar of the donations without actually mentioning the amount of people that donate.
• Losing an item hurts 2,6 times more than the excitement you'd get for gaining that same item. So we tend to avoid losing thing because the hurt more (loss aversion). Wikipedia could include this like this: "This is your Xth visit to our website in the past months and hope to have you back many more times in the future. To ensure our continued service to you, we need your help" This is still quite soft, you could experiment with more extreme loss aversion variants.
• Explain why you need help. The current text is very implicit, make it explicit.
• Show a monetary field pre-filled with the donation amount. Play around with the default value that you show.
• Reduce uncertainty and let people know what you do with the money (or link to a source that shows your budget).
• ... let me know your suggestions in the comments!

And yes, I've intentionally used a lot of Wikipedia links in this article for additional information. If you like that kind of content and not loose access too it, maybe you should donate to them too ;).

BTW: If you're from Wikipedia or know someone there: let me know if you want to do some research and/or run some experiments on the website to improve donations, happy to help out :).