2011/8/9 Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
Well, let's be clear here: in what sense are the chapters "participating"
in
the fundraiser, rather than merely being its beneficiaries? The
underlying
fundraising work -- the actual solicitation of donations, in other words
--
is performed by WMF staff directly. The chapters do provide some level
of
administrative and accounting support, obviously; but that could just as easily be done by the WMF as well, and likely at lower cost.
Wow, this is a gross misrepresentation of the reality.
While Foundation staff has provided an invaluable support to make the fundraiser a success, it probably wouldn't have been such a success hadn't there been dozens of volunteers, among which _many_ chapter board members and simple members who spent uncounted hours of localizing and adapting messages, providing stories, refining landing pages, answering donors questions etc.
You may want to look at the fundraising pages on meta to see the level of involvement of the community as a whole in making it a success, and even that does not give a real idea of how much chapters' communities have participated (much happens on their chapters' mailing lists for example).
I'm not suggesting that the success of the fundraiser isn't due in large part to broad community involvement; my assertion is that this community involvement would take place whether or not a formal chapter was involved. I would assume that the volunteers who contributed to the effort presumably did so because they believed in the goals of the project and the need to raise funds to support them, not because their particular chapter stood to collect a large sum of money in the process?
Kirill