[Foundation-l] Board letter about fundraising and chapters

[John Vandenberg]

On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 3:55 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
>
> We are quite concerned that some chapters who have signed fundraising
> agreements (now and in the past) have actually been unable to live up their
> requirements of reporting on time and meeting other needs; however, we
> expect all parties -- the WMF and the chapters -- to follow the agreements
> that have been signed. (If parts of the agreement are not followed on either
> side, we also expect that the agreement will be invalidated).  We also
> expect all parties to take into account the principles we lay out here, the
> very most important one of which is:  "The Foundation can confidently assure
> donors to the chapter that their donations will be safeguarded, that our
> movement's transparency principles will be met, and that spending will be in
> line with our mission and with the messages used to attract donors."

How does tax-deductibility status achieve that?  Why the sudden change
in the wording, or in our previously agreed understanding on that
aspect.
That wording change is what the board is using to invalidate most of
the chapters agreements which have been signed.

Did the board receive a report from the WMF staff who attended the
Fundraising Summit?
If you have, you will know that the main impediment to WMAU becoming
tax-deductible is that large chunks of money are sent from Australia
to the US.  We cant fix this with the previous or current agreement,
which was written by WMF.  How will removing WMAU from the fundraiser
fix the tax-deductible problem?  It wont.  Tax-deductibility is being
used to achieve your other laudable motives.

Btw, the WMF is not in a strong position when it talks about
transparency and the messages it sends to donors.

> And we appreciate that many chapters (the majority of which don't fundraise
> at all, in fact) either cannot or are unable to meet various parts of these
> principles or the current agreement. We don't want to leave anyone stranded;
> to that end, we are committed to increasing and expanding grants for chapter
> operations.

We have WMF staff, bottom to top, telling us that we are now not
compliant to the agreement due to "problems" that the WMF has known
about for a long time, and is only now raising.  Knowing these issues,
the WMF hounded us to sign the new agreement.

I appreciate the gesture that you (the board) wont leave us stranded,
however I would prefer that the WMF stops being a bully and accepts
that this is not how you do change management.
The chapters agreement gives the chapter a reasonable amount of
control over the messages sent to donors, and that was a critical
component of the fundraiser here in Australia, and it heavily
contributed to our successes in outreach.

--
John Vandenberg