A list of suggestions, kindly sent offling by one of our participant and reworked to suit our organisation.
I'd like that these are taken into account by the Foundraising committee (the job of the Fundraising committee is not only to raise money in summer 2006, but also to organise sustainable Fundraising practices.
Spend no more than 35% of related contributions on fund raising. Related contributions include donations, legacies, and other gifts received as a result of fund raising efforts. -->Compute and publish the cost of fundraising per year
Address privacy concerns of donors by providing a clear, prominent and easily accessible donor privacy policy that tells donors (i) what information, if any, is being collected about them and how this information will be used, (ii) how to contact us to review personal information collected and request corrections, (iii) how to inform us (e.g., a check off box) that the donor does not wish his/her personal information to be shared outside the organization, and (iv) what security measures we have in place to protect personal information.
Clearly disclose how we benefit from the sale of products (cafepress) that state or imply that the Foundation will benefit from a consumer sale or transaction. Such promotions should disclose, at the point of solicitation: *the actual or anticipated portion of the purchase price that will benefit WMF (e.g., 5 cents will be contributed to Foundation for every xyz company product sold. Make that be not only on the official webshop, but only any related product sold by a local associaton (in this case, list the product and mention the benefit goes to the local association) *the duration of the campaign (e.g., the month of October), *any maximum, minimum or average contribution amount. Which benefit may be obtained from giving over 1000 dollars, over 10 000 dollars etc...
Respond promptly to and act on complaints brought to its attention about fund raising practices (OTRS essentially).
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising On this page, the paragraph ''how your donation will help" is badly outdated (some of the links go to pages which are no more active).
Anthere wrote:
A list of suggestions, kindly sent offling by one of our participant and reworked to suit our organisation.
I'd like that these are taken into account by the Foundraising committee (the job of the Fundraising committee is not only to raise money in summer 2006, but also to organise sustainable Fundraising practices.
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages? I know this has been suggested many times in the past, but the quality of many of the Wikimedia pages, particular a focused sub-set of Wikipedia (like the Astronomy Wikiproject, for example, or the Chemistry Wikiproject pages) would do quite well. There are also a number of Wikijunior books that are in fairly good shape, and if there was a group ready to do formal publication of Wikimedia materials like this I think the formal proofreading necessary for publication would come and make some of these projects of even higher quality than they already are. And the multi-lingual versions of almost all of these higher quality Wikimedia pages are already translated as well.
Sure, I can (and have) print this stuff on my own, but it would be a good steady income for the Foundation if there were some sort of on-line store available for people to purchase these products. And this would also be consistant with Wikimedia goals for the dissemination of this content. It will be done sooner or later anyway, and it would be nice to see an initive that would involve active Wikimedians instead of some profiteer who doesn't care about the WMF or the Wikimedia projects. If this were part of an official WMF effort rather than something ad-hoc by some users, it also wouldn't be too far off to even have links directly from Wikimedia project pages to a "printed version" of the content. I don't think too many people would object to seeing that sort of link, especially if it wasn't obnoxious.
There are groups like Lulu press that offer things like this, and I'm sure there are other resources available to help with the physical printing. What really needs to happen is that somebody tie all of this together and actually do it, rather than talk about it. The other problem is that it will take a little bit of seed money to get started, and that is some initial financial risk as it is possible that you could end up with a huge stack of books or CDs that nobody wants to buy. I believe this risk can be minimized, and once it has been proven that content of this nature can be sold, you can expand the offerings. The other challenge is that Wikimedia projects have a truly world-wide reach, so perhaps seperate efforts at local Wikimedia chapters might be better to offer this?
Anyway, this is some food for thought, and I hope that there are others who might be interested in seeing this happen. I think the time has come to put something like this together.
On 6/11/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages?
I fear that printed material like this is of sufficiently low margin as to not be a very effective fundraising activity. The costs involved in producing high-quality printed material are substantial. Sadly, the quality of product produced by the vanity presses (like Lulu) is not very high, and I fear that it would do us a disservice. (I have the same concern regarding the merchandise we sell through Cafe Press.)
Kelly
Kelly Martin wrote:
On 6/11/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages?
I fear that printed material like this is of sufficiently low margin as to not be a very effective fundraising activity. The costs involved in producing high-quality printed material are substantial. Sadly, the quality of product produced by the vanity presses (like Lulu) is not very high, and I fear that it would do us a disservice. (I have the same concern regarding the merchandise we sell through Cafe Press.)
Kelly
And that is precisely the risk we are talking about here. And one of the many reasons why it hasn't been done. The difference here is that Wikipedia does have a brand that means something beyond those typical of a vanity press, and a reason why I think there should be at least an exploration of the idea with some test-marketing. As far as Cafe Press is concerned, the up-front costs are sufficiently low enough that it justifies the marginal income that comes in from such an activity. I'm not suggesting that this can completely or even substantially replace the current direct plea for donations, but it could be some minor income to add that extra little bit needed.
And this is something supposedly already covered by some grant money (aka Wikijunior) where supposedly some printed materials were promised but never delivered. I'm suggesting that perhaps we need to deliver on at least that promise, and it would be a good avenue to see if other printed materials might also be attractive.
On 6/11/06, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/11/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages?
I fear that printed material like this is of sufficiently low margin as to not be a very effective fundraising activity. The costs involved in producing high-quality printed material are substantial. Sadly, the quality of product produced by the vanity presses (like Lulu) is not very high, and I fear that it would do us a disservice. (I have the same concern regarding the merchandise we sell through Cafe Press.)
Kelly
I think CDs and/or DVDs would make a good "thank you" gift for donators. Wikimedia might even get someone to donate the cost of physically producing the CDs/DVDs. In that sense I think it'd increase the amount of donations. I always used to buy my FreeBSD install CDs directly from freebsd.org rather than from Cheapbytes (back before *BSD died :), and I think a lot of people do that kind of thing.
The real issue I think would be the legal can of worms it would open. Better for Wikimedia to license its copyrights and trademarks to a third party (on a $ per copy basis) and let them sell the CDs/DVDs/print versions?/etc.
On 12/06/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
As usual, the Germans are ahead of us. ;)
Brianna
Brianna Laugher wrote:
On 12/06/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiReader
As usual, the Germans are ahead of us. ;)
Brianna
After going over this link, I don't see what is different between that or a similar link on Wikibooks:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks%3APDF_Versions
I havn't gone digging around in the German version of this page, but it does seem interesting. As I've pointed out, it is not for a lack of content that printed versions aren't being made of Wikimedia content, just the time, effort, and money necessary to get it to work. And somebody to make the leap and get it done.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org