On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Kirill Lokshin
<kirill.lokshin(a)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