[Foundation-l] donate to Wikimedia Deutschland

[Jens Ropers]

Leaving aside Daniel's concerns over how Wikimedia Deutschland 
currently uses the dough (somebody from Wikimedia Deutschland should 
answer that), Walter's email is an important reminder that we really 
should get going about offering the EU standard bank transfer to EU 
donors.

What we need to provide so people can do these transactions:

* our BIC (Bank Identification Code)
* our IBAN (International Bank Account Number)
* the full international postal address of our bank (because some banks 
want this data as a fallback mechanism, in case there's probs w/ the 
BIC/IBAN data.

Note that the full postal address is currently missing from 
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden.html.

EU donors (even if they are totally unfamiliar w/ EU standard 
transactions) can then take that info to their bank and get going 
sending the money.

The donation page should explain a bit about EU standard bank transfers 
-- because EU standard transactions are still fairly new and not even 
all EU citizens know about them. (I think I was one of the first people 
to do them at my bank, but I now do one every one or two months -- easy 
peasy.) It should be made clear that these transactions CANNOT, by EU 
law, cost more than national transactions and that every EU bank has to 
offer them. In other words, for anyone with an EU current account, an 
an EU transaction is probably the cheapest way. (Admittedly, in terms 
of convenience credit cards still have an edge, because EU standard 
transactions require the user to do the transaction through their bank 
(instead of punching in a few numbers on our site) and not all banks 
let their customers do EU standard transactions online yet.

Pretty redundant info, just in case:
EU standard transactions are bank transfers between two EU banks. The 
donor needs an EU bank account and we need one. They're cheap, they're 
''relatively'' fast (still can take up to a few days till funds fully 
register in the recipient's account) and once you've got the above 
data, EU transactions are quite painless (as opposed to any other 
international transaction).
It really, truly does not matter what EU bank account we use for 
accepting EU standard transactions. It could be a current account in 
any EU country and we DON'T need an account in each EU country from 
that perspective. The only advantage to having multiple EU current 
accounts would be that donors from a respective country could then also 
use their "old" national bank transfer mechanism to donate, and they 
might be more familiar with that. So maybe to offer separate accounts 
for the bigger countries would be good -- and, yes, it's especially 
good to have/offer a bank account with Germany, because German's mostly 
just don't get^W, sorry, do credit cards and the country's the most 
populous of the EU.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com