[Foundation-l] Three fundraising job openings

[Delphine Ménard]

I'll try and explain.

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 9:39 AM, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe a question with an obvious reply, in that case please forgive my
>  ignorance. Could you (Erik, Michael, or anyone else who spotted the answer
>  already) elaborate a bit on what is meant by "community giving"? It sounds
>  to me like it is asking the editing community to give more money, but that
>  would strike me a bit as odd, as my amateuristic expectation would be that
>  most of the fundraising money is coming from the visitors, not as much from
>  the editors.

Community giving (and as I understand, it was quite hard to actually
find a "name" for that position), refers to the people, readers,
editors, contributors, friends who have helped our projects (primarily
with money, since we already have a volunteer coordinator :-)). The
idea is that Wikimedia is, to some extent unusual, in that the greater
part of its fundraising happens online for one, and also mainly comes
from "small donors" like you and I. However, you will grant me that
"Head of "small donors" somehow does not sound as good. Basically, we
don't know most of our supporters, why they support us, why they would
continue to support us and why they would stop supporting us. I do
believe that this position, which in the first part will dedicate to
understanding our donors and in the second will help develop the right
communication(s) towards them, is an essential part of our fundraising
strategy.

So, no, the "community" in this job description is not "the community
of editing contributors" but rather the "community of supporters who
support in their own little way". Community is a term that refers to
more than just "our community", there are lots of "communities" out
there and we need to talk to/with them about how they can best support
us.

>
>  Finally, I hope very much that this will finally lead to a better strategy
>  with respect to Europe, where quite some chances have been missed in the
>  past imho (with respect to paying methods for example), so I hope that the
>  person who gets this job does not only speak at least one other language to
>  understand what translating is about, but also has experience with
>  fundraising in at least two continents (but I am afraid this will be a tough
>  skill set to find :) )

Of course, I agree with you. I hope that chapters and active local
communities/editors will get to work closely with the people in these
new positions in order to share their knowledge, cultural awareness
and help them choose the best strategies for effective fundraising. I
am sure that bar a few succesful countries, Wikimedia as a whole still
needs to work a lot on localizing its base support.


Cheers,

Delphine
-- 
~notafish
http://blog.notanendive.org

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