[Foundation-l] Chapters

[Ilario Valdelli]

On 28.08.2011 16:46, Risker wrote:
> On 28 August 2011 04:47, rupert THURNER<rupert.thurner at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> 2011/8/28 Delphine Ménard<notafishz at gmail.com>:
>>
>> +1.
>> in switzerland we feel that a good target is to get 1 CHF per user and
>> year as donation. not having a better means of calculating the users,
>> we took 10% of the working population as guess. for switzerland that
>> means, 8 mio inhabitants, 4 mio working, 400'000 users, i.e. 400'000
>> donation.
>>
>> any measure that brings down the donations means that we are failing
>> to make the people happy about wikimedia projects, and thats a path we
>> probably do not want to walk.
>>
>>
>
> and could easily lead to concerns from outside agencies and individuals as
> well.  The hypothetical that we were "losing" donors because in many
> countries tax receipts could not be issued has turned out to be false -
> because many chapters that received a percentage of local donations were
> still not able to issue tax receipts last year. Realistically, given the
> basic chapter agreement, there are many that will never be able to obtain
> the local equivalent of "charitable organization" status.

This is incorrect because to receive tax exemption a person doesn't need 
to have a receipt.

At least for Switzerland the donor can only indicate to have donate an 
amount to one national charitable association. A receipt is not 
requested if the donation is lower than a fixed amount (200 CHF ~300 USD).

http://www.wikimedia.ch/index.php?title=Donate/en&setlang=en

In general this is valid also for other countries (and in some of them 
it's sufficient to have a receipt of the transaction).

I don't know who has said that the tax receipts have not been issued and 
the persons were not able to receive the tax exemption, but this is 
incorrect.

In WM CH some receipts have not been issued *automatically* because we 
have received donations with incomplete data (the address for example), 
but these persons have never requested one. In general some of them 
prefer to donate locally because they would be sure that the money is 
spent for local projects and not for tax exemption.


Ilario