[Foundation-l] Chapters

[Kirill Lokshin]

2011/8/9 Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com>

> On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Well, let's be clear here: in what sense are the chapters "participating"
> in
> > the fundraiser, rather than merely being its beneficiaries?  The
> underlying
> > fundraising work -- the actual solicitation of donations, in other words
> --
> > is performed by WMF staff directly.  The chapters do provide some level
> of
> > administrative and accounting support, obviously; but that could just as
> > easily be done by the WMF as well, and likely at lower cost.
>
> Wow, this is a gross misrepresentation of the reality.
>
> While Foundation staff has provided an invaluable support to make the
> fundraiser a success, it probably wouldn't have been such a success
> hadn't there been dozens of volunteers, among which _many_ chapter
> board members and simple members who spent uncounted hours of
> localizing and adapting messages, providing stories, refining landing
> pages, answering donors questions etc.
>
> You may want to look at the fundraising pages on meta to see the level
> of involvement of the community as a whole in making it a success, and
> even that does not give a real idea of how much chapters' communities
> have participated (much happens on their chapters' mailing lists for
> example).


I'm not suggesting that the success of the fundraiser isn't due in large
part to broad community involvement; my assertion is that this community
involvement would take place whether or not a formal chapter was involved.
 I would assume that the volunteers who contributed to the effort presumably
did so because they believed in the goals of the project and the need to
raise funds to support them, not because their particular chapter stood to
collect a large sum of money in the process?

Kirill