[Foundation-l] The end of donations

[stevertigo]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:12 PM, Tim Starling<tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Do you mean building an endowment? Because the Foundation management
> believes that donors expect their money to be spent on charitable
> activities, and that reserves should only be sufficient to cover
> income fluctuations over the next few years. I'm told that this is the
> prevailing wisdom in the non-profit world.
>
> However, the reserve is enough that if one income source were to stop,
> others could be developed before money to pay the fundraising staff
> dried up. So it's self-sufficient in that way.

My impression is that Wikimedia currently lives year to year on
donations, and that reserves are sufficient to pay a skeleton crew of
fundraisers.  I'm sure its been discussed before though, but yes, it
would seem to make sense for Wikimedia - established as its flagship
project is - to build an endowment or trust - donation-seeded and
transparently managed of course - to cover most yearly costs.

Wikipedia alone has been several times estimated to be in the 4-5
billion dollars market worth range, so - at least now while I'm
sitting here in a free internet cafe and still wearing last night's
rose-colored beer goggles - a quarter-billion dollar long-term
endowment figure doesn't seem too infeasible to me. There are quality
assurance issues with en.wiki articles though, that might put limits
on those seed funds.

-Stevertigo