It struck me that the Foundation has decided to concentrate on the large public, the small donators, and not seek much further to approach big spenders or make money by business partnerships. This is a statement not only about our history and our future, and also about our character as movement. Is it too much to call this an event of historical importance?
Kind regards Ziko
2010/6/30 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, When we raise money, we have a choice; either we spend the money and we communicate what we plan to do or we build reserves for a rainy day. In the Netherlands there are several charities that find it much harder to raise funds for any purpose now that they are known to build huge reserves. This was made worse when they wanted to raise funds after many of their investments went sour.
As I understand our finances, we forecast a great need and at the same time are frugal spending realising the communicated goals. Consequently there is an operational reserve. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a university and consequently it does not operate along those lines. Mind you, an American university is a completely different beast then for instance a Dutch university and our universities have as respectable reputation while their funding is not reliant on huge endowments.
In my opinion we are on a mission and we should share this mission as widely as possible. This is why it is not acceptable that so much of the our finances rely on USA donations. We need chapters that take part in everything that makes the WMF possible. This includes fund raising and operating programs that benefit our projects and free knowledge in general.
When people, organisations want to contribute to an endowment, they should do so separately from our fund raisers. These are to enable us to do what we aim to do. This will gain us more contributions then building large reserves. Thanks, GerardM
PS you is "the reader"
On 30 June 2010 17:38, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:48 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, When you consider the source of much of the donations, you will find that they have been coming mainly from the United States. Chapters are
becoming
more and more active in fundraising. The Dutch chapter for instance plans
on
professionalising its operations and fundraising staff has the highest priority. It performed much better, one of the reasons is that IDEAL, a payment method for the Internet in the Netherlands, was implemented. I am sure that with increased support from the WMF not only but also the Dutch will raise substantially more money this time around.
When you ask for an endowment, you indicate an opinion that the current levels of support for our projects suffice. I do not share that opinion
and,
I am happy to find indications in the planning that this opinion is supported in the plans for 2010/11. Milos and myself will talk in Gdansk about the need to improve technical support for our smallest projects
(think
Hindi, Malayalam... hundreds of million people will benefit..). Some of
it
is hard core language support and some are changes to operating projects
in
order to raise traffic and usability for readers.
Hi Gerard, A small point -- I don't know who the "you" refers to here -- me? -- but when *I* ask for an endowment, it is not because I think the current levels of support suffice; that's a different question. It's because I don't want the long-term support for Wikimedia to be dependent on our ability to fundraise increasingly large amounts from year to year. Fundraising above and beyond such an endowment is fine and good and necessary as well. I have heard that raising an endowment was rejected by the strategy process because it was hard; I don't know what that means, exactly, but raising an extra $20M in a recession is hard, too.
Someone was talking to me the other day about the differences between Wikimedia and large universities, such as the one where I work. "You don't mind criticizing the university governance", he said; "in part because you can't imagine it ever going away, no matter what."
It's true, and I want Wikimedia to be that stable. In fact, I want it to be *more* stable than most American universities are at the moment -- certainly more than mine!
-- phoebe
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l