[Foundation-l] Fundraiser update

[Erik Moeller]

A quick update: the "Thank You" banner is currently scheduled to stay
up until January 9, 4 PM PST. We're keeping it up a while longer in
part because it's the first work week after the holidays for many
people, and in part because it's an opportunity for chapters to get
some more visibility (we may have reached our goals ahead of time, but
the chapters were operating under the assumption that the fundraiser
would continue until January 15). As explained in the "Thank You"
letter, the funds donated to WMF from now until the end of the fiscal
year will go into our reserve fund and will help us to not live from
hand to mouth as we head into the new fiscal. We'd always planned to
raise at least $1.3M in reserve funding throughout the fiscal year.

Obviously we're thrilled by the success of the fundraiser: many thanks
to Rand and the rest of the team here for making it happen. :-)
Special _huge, huge_ thanks to Casey and all the translation
volunteers for their help throughout the process. It's hard to
overstate the value of the volunteer contributions of time and effort
to the fundraiser, and I think it speaks to the strength of our
sustainability model. :-)

As always, there'll be lots to learn & improve as well. We'll start
preparing some follow-up reports and analysis soon. (We still intend
to share raw data files with the community, but we have to do some
more clean-up, especially on check data, before it'll be useful.) In
the meantime, if you already have some thoughts & immediate comments
on the fundraiser -- what worked, what didn't, what we should focus on
-- please feel free to post them in this thread.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate