On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Tim Starlingtstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Do you mean building an endowment? Because the Foundation management believes that donors expect their money to be spent on charitable activities, and that reserves should only be sufficient to cover income fluctuations over the next few years. I'm told that this is the prevailing wisdom in the non-profit world.
However, the reserve is enough that if one income source were to stop, others could be developed before money to pay the fundraising staff dried up. So it's self-sufficient in that way.
My impression is that Wikimedia currently lives year to year on donations, and that reserves are sufficient to pay a skeleton crew of fundraisers. I'm sure its been discussed before though, but yes, it would seem to make sense for Wikimedia - established as its flagship project is - to build an endowment or trust - donation-seeded and transparently managed of course - to cover most yearly costs.
Wikipedia alone has been several times estimated to be in the 4-5 billion dollars market worth range, so - at least now while I'm sitting here in a free internet cafe and still wearing last night's rose-colored beer goggles - a quarter-billion dollar long-term endowment figure doesn't seem too infeasible to me. There are quality assurance issues with en.wiki articles though, that might put limits on those seed funds.
-Stevertigo