[Tails-project] Analysis of the 2017 donation campaign

Hey,

I'm back with more stats.

Meta: Last year my post hasn't got a single reply, so this time I'll be
more straight to the point and I'll only share the spreadsheets with the
fundraising team to save me some work.

Fundraising team:

- donors.git:analysis/2016/Donation\ campaign\ 2016.ods
- donors.git:analysis/2017/Donation\ campaign\ 2017.ods

Summary: Did we do better this year? Yes but no.

We received 101 644€ from 1167 donations.

That's +34% more money but -43% less donors.

Having a closer look, 55% of that (56k€) comes from 2 huge bitcoin
donations (25k€ & 31k€).

Looking at small donors only:

- They gave -49% less in total (15k€ vs 29k€)
- They were -43% less (1112 donations vs 1947 donations)

But small and big donors have decreased in the same proportion.

We got 10 donations > $1000 that should be added to /donate/partners.

This year I could do better stats on the /donate page using Matomo
though I couldn't compare them to last year because of the bugs I had.

The biggest source of hits on /donate was from banner (41%).
A huge share comes with no "?r=" parameters (32%) and I haven't really
investigated why (I could if you ask me).

What else do you want to know?

Following up on some of my insights from last year:

- Do less posts and focus more on the benefits for the users.

We did that and that seems a good bet since the donate buttons on the
blog posts only represent 5% of the total hits on /donate and only work
2 times better than release notes.

- Stop being careful about the calendar.

We continued to publish at the end of the week but the stats on the days
of the week changed a lot. So it seems like the day of the week for our
blog posts doesn't really matter.

- Tails donors love Bitcoin.

Especially huge mysterious donors. But the number of bitcoin donations
suffered more (-68%) than the number of PayPal (-20%) or wire transfer
donations (-32%).

- Change the $20 button to be $25.

We did -10% of $25 which we raised from $20 (+25%) so that seem to be a
good move, despite -2% on $50 (very rough maths!).

- Consider lowering the $250 and $500 buttons.

Last year we had:

$250: 2 donations
$500: 1 donation

This year we had:

$150: 1 donation
$200: 6 donations

I'm not sure how to draw conclusions on that :)

--
sajolida