Anthony wrote:
On 5/20/07, Pierre Beaudouin pierre.beaudouin@wikimedia.fr wrote:
To be constructive, do you have some ideas to collect more money ? What should be change during the next fundraising ?
First step is to publicly distribute monthly financial statements and a detailed budget which minimizes unnecessary costs.
Sure, better financial reporting would help; quarterly would be adequate. Good budgetting practice would also bring transparency to the situation. Opaque finances only too easily makes people suspicious even where there is no real cause to be suspicious.
The rest of the details really come from how much if any shortfall results from that. I suspect there won't be any, so long as the budget really does minimize unnecessary costs.
That all depends on how you define unnecessary costs. A grest deal of setting budgets depends on informed guesswork. It involves allowing for some margin of error in our guesses. The more optimistic assumptions should indeed project a shortfall, but that would also include wishlist expenditures that can easily be dropped if revenue expectations are not met.
Leasing servers instead of purchasing them is one factor which should help a great deal.
I've already expressed my disagreement with you on that. Leasing is only the better option when your blinders limit your perspective to short term cash flow. Things are quite different when you think in terms of a three plus year plan.
Ec