The WMUK board's regular two-day strategy overview meeting was held in
Cambridge last weekend. This is the time of year when we focus on future
plans and we were joined by our interim CEO, D’Arcy Myers, who provided
us with fresh perspectives from the point of view of a relative newcomer.
The minutes of the meeting are being prepared, and should be available
within the next week, but the board felt that it would be useful to
publish a guide to the broad challenges that face us, and how we are
tackling them.
One of the tasks of the meeting was to review the third quarter
financial report, which included a consideration of the full impact of
Wikimania. The WMUK office ended up playing a larger role than had
originally been anticipated, and the charity's costs on both staff and
Wikimania-related programmes in the third quarter of the year has been
significantly higher than anticipated. At the same time, the Funds
Distribution Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation has indicated that it
will not recommend granting WMUK the full amount we requested for the
2015-16 financial year.
These factors mean that the board needs to review our plans for the
coming year in the light of the reduced funds available to us, and to
ensure that in spite of financial constraints our reserves are not
allowed to drop to an unacceptably low level.
It is inevitable that over the next year the charity will need
significantly to reduce its direct expenditure, both on overheads and on
programmes, and over the next few weeks our CEO will be working on his
recommendations for a detailed action plan to achieve that. The focus
will be not on 'business as usual' and salami-slicing our existing
expenditure, but on the opportunity we have to re-direct our energies
towards those programmes that are most able to provide us with high
charitable impact when weighed against the resources required (direct
costs, staff costs, number of willing and skilled volunteers available
and so on).
We need to prioritise, and to accept that we no longer have the luxury
of being able to support highly-resourced programmes that do not provide
a commensurate level of direct charitable impact when measured against
our strategic goals. There are an almost infinite number of useful free
knowledge projects we could be involved in, including many which are
directly aligned with our goals. But we have to have the courage to turn
projects down and acknowledge that our charitable aims are best met by
doing a limited number of projects exceptionally well than accepting a
multitude of ideas that we don't have the resources to follow up on.
Of course, the resources available to us are not fixed, and we will be
making significant directed efforts to increase both volunteer resources
and also locally-sourced finance via UK-based fundraising and gifts in
kind. The extent to which we are able to accept and support project
ideas for which we have insufficient core funding is likely to depend on
whether the project has a sufficiently large and skilled group of
enthusiastic volunteers who are able to lead and run it with minimal
staff help, and whether it is of interest to external grant-makers who
can be persuaded to cover the non-core costs.
Once the CEO has a draft action plan and 2015-16 budget prepared, they
will be shared with the community for comment and suggestions before
coming to the board for approval of a financially sustainable package of
activities geared to achieving our agreed strategy. We are happy to
accept general questions on this, but of course we can't discuss
anything relating to internal HR or staffing issues.
Best regards
Michael
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Michael Maggs
Chair, Wikimedia UK
for the board
