The Foundation’s Brand Awareness priority aims to increase awareness of, and affinity with, the Wikimedia brand. While this priority focuses primarily on brand awareness among the general population, we also measured awareness of, and affinity with, the Wikimedia Foundation among the movement’s online contributors.
Figure 1: The last year saw some improvement in contributors' alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation's vision, as well as confidence in its ability to support the global movement.2*"The Wikimedia Foundation's vision is "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." Response options were a 4-point scale: Not at all, somewhat, mostly, or completely. Mostly/completely appear as favorable (blue), Not at all/somewhat as unfavorable (red).
Clarifying and strengthening the global perception of Wikimedia and our free knowledge mission, and growing awareness and affinity with people in places we don’t yet serve.
Figure 2: Average Foundation support scores among groups for whom a statistically significant difference from other contributors was found.3
Contributors' awareness of the Wikimedia Foundation increased over the last year, as we saw between 2018 and 2019. Overall, 85% of respondents were aware of the Foundation in 2019, and 90% were in 2020. Increased awareness was notable among some groups in particular, including a 12 percentage point increase among women (to 88% in 2020) and a 4 point increase among contributors living in Western Europe (to 93%). As was the case last year, awareness was higher among those living in Northern America (97%) and lower among those in Eastern Europe (86%).1
While overall Foundation support hasn't changed from 2019 (3.90) to 2020 (3.92), some elements of support have. As was the case last year, contributors indicated a high level of alignment with the Foundation’s vision of “a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge”: 89% indicated that this vision mostly or completely represented their values and/or Wikimedia-related work (up 4 percentage points from 2019). A smaller majority indicated confidence in the Foundation: 65% agreed that the Foundation is able to support the global movement (up 4 points from 2019) and 64% agreed that the Foundation has the right programs and strategies to achieve its vision (See Figure 1).2
The combination of these indicators didn't change overall, but we did find some significant change within some groups. While women's feelings of Foundation support -- lower than other contributors' last year -- showed a large improvement since 2019 (3.70 to 3.96), we saw some losses among English language Wikipedia contributors (3.87 to 3.78) and those living in Northern Europe (4.07 to 3.95), a group which had higher than average Foundation support scores in 2019. As was true last year, support was higher among those living in Africa (4.39) and lower among those in East Asia (3.70) (See Figure 2).3
