2009/1/7 Dan Rosenthal swatjester@gmail.com:
Anecdotally, I thought it was about the same, but I did notice a LOT more questioning of what the money was going to. Like you, just impressions, no facts to back it up.
Perhaps so - an absolute increase of scrutiny is certainly to be expected as the overall number of donations nearly tripled, i.e. we have asked for, and received, a lot more attention than ever before. The upside and downside of the growing blogosphere with millions of micromedia is the same: There's a lot more voices and opinions. Rumors spread much more quickly, and false claims can be repeated (and monetized) much more easily than ever before. So can important statements of fact.
If we empower our volunteers through a high degree of operational transparency, facts should prevail. That principle has informed many decisions we've made this year: hence the detailed Q&As on the budget and the financial statements, the detailed Annual Report, etc. Overall we're very happy with these materials, and in my opinion they represent the highest degree of operational transparency that we've ever had.
In some areas, we've found our materials to be worthy of improvement, and I think it'll become clearer what those areas are as we further analyze the fundraiser as a whole. For example, while we've tried to explain that expense categories in the pie charts represent entire departmental budgets rather than individual salaries, they were still often misunderstood or misconstrued to be the latter. Being more specific and providing further data on how money is spent in each category should help both readers and volunteers who want to correct misunderstandings.
The flip side of the coin is communicating impact through hard data and personal stories. That, too, is an area in which we can improve, especially if we continue to grow operationally. How many more people edit due to usability improvements? What, if any, was the positive impact of the FlaggedRevs extension? Has site responsiveness and uptime increased? How many more videos have been uploaded thanks to new capacity? How many books have been printed via PediaPress? How many people have attended Wikipedia workshops around the world? How many static copies of Wikipedia are circulating as DVDs, on laptops, etc.? And how are people's lives transformed through our work?
As a 23-people organization, it's clear that our communication efforts need to culminate in volunteer-driven efforts of both a proactive and reactive nature. That's already the case to a great degree (thanks to volunteers like yourself), and I hope that we will continue to improve in that regard.