On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com> wrote:

While there is no absolute requirement to spend money within a year,
there is a requirement to justify your reserves. Having big reserves
just because you didn't get around to spending it isn't going to sit
very well. Transferring more to the WMF is an option, but we don't
want to end up with raising funds for the WMF looking like our primary
mission (that wouldn't necessarily preclude charity status, but it
would complicate things - it may also not sit well with the
membership). The big question is, is transferring the funds to the WMF
going to further our mission better than spending it ourselves in a
rush? That's not easy to answer...

Well, one way to spend money in order to directly support the UK community's goals would be, once you have a chapter manager, to hire an agency or contractor to run an awareness campaign (Posters at public transportation outlets, radio and telivision ads, etc.) to get other people to contribute in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects and get the face of the community out there, like Wikimedia Deutschland did. Even though this doesn't feed Wikimedia UK's membership and activities persay, an effective awareness campaign gets people ready and thinking about other types of engagement, such as the Education and GLAM stuffs and the annual fundraiser (it helps that people know there is a local group of volunteers not just the US Foundation, I would imagine), and also gets other organizations talking about Wikipedia.