[Foundation-l] Fundraising is for men

Wed Nov 30 12:49:23 UTC 2011

Thanks for the reply, Erik. To clarify my figures, I included
Wikimania travel in the travel number, and staff development in the
staffing costs. In any case, my argument wasn't that Wikimedia was
misspending its funds. I don't think that's true. I'm sure there are
perfectly reasonable explanations for $120k in staff expenditures per
employee, and over $15k in travel costs per employee. The amounts
merely demonstrate that the WMF isn't, and doesn't need to be, a
paragon of frugality.

Somewhat OT, yes, but -- the point was simply that the WMF is at a
stage of organizational development where short-staffing and poverty
are no longer its defining elements, and can no longer be the core of
a fundraising appeal. To me that means the conversion rate of readers
to donors, and the gender parity in donors, are of less than pressing
concern (as suggested by emirjp's e-mail and rupert's reply).

Nathan

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:03 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey Nathan,
>
> a bit OT from the thread title, but just clarifying a couple of points:
>
>> * The WMF spends over $2 million on fundraising alone
>
> In FY 2010-11, WMF raised $23M in contributions, not counting $
> restricted to future time periods. In the same time period, $2.142M
> expenses were allocated to fundraising, including $556K in credit card
> processing fees. [1][2] That's altogether less than 10 cents on the
> dollar, which by the standards of charity watchdog organizations, is
> qualified as an excellent fundraising efficiency (cf. [3][4]). This
> includes very different types of fundraising activity (grant-writing
> and grant management, donor cultivation, usability testing of credit
> card forms, etc.).
>
>> * The travel budget is nearly $2m (that's right, two million dollars
>> in travel costs)
>
> The 2011-12 travel budget is $1.742M [5]. A little bit of detail as to
> how this breaks out is included in the Audited Financials FAQ [1], but
> in a nutshell:
>
> * WMF is a global organization and is doing work on the ground in many
> corners of the world, in partnership with chapters where they exist,
> and WMF staff routinely have to travel internationally as a normal
> part of their day-to-day work;
> * WMF sponsors volunteer travel extensively, for Wikimania, for
> hackathons, for WMF site visits and meetings, and for many other
> purposes;
> * Many contractors work for WMF from all over the world, and it's part
> of the cost of doing business in this way that you bring people
> together for face-to-face meetings on a regular basis.
>
> Travel is regulated by the WMF travel policy which ensures that
> individual travel expenses are not excessive or profligate. [6]
>
>> * The budget includes a whopping $14 million on staffing costs (at the
>> planned 117 number of staff, that is nearly $120k per staff member)
>
> The 2010-11 staffing budget is $13.3M. [5] Staffing costs include
> payroll taxes, recruiting costs, and benefits, and of course pay bands
> for different roles vary significantly, but are consistent with
> similar non-profit organizations, i.e. below the market rate paid at
> for-profit companies.
>
> More background about the guiding principles of Wikimedia's
> compensation practices can be found in [7].
>
>> * The last fundraiser sent over $6 million to chapters, with little
>> insight or transparency into how that money is spent
>
> Chapters processing donations in the 2010 fundraiser were required, as
> part of their participation, to commit to various obligations. See [8]
> for the Wikimedia UK agreement as an example. Specifically with regard
> to transparency, WMF, community, and chapters have worked together to
> ensure that key information about chapter activities and financial
> information can be easily found. [9]
>
> At its July 2011 Board meeting, the WMF Board of Trustees agreed to a
> letter regarding fundraising accountability [10] which further
> emphasized principles of accountability, transparency, and fairness,
> and led to shifting chapters increasingly towards applying for grants
> to fund program work. Program plans both for chapters receiving grants
> and processing payments through the fundraiser are shared and reviewed
> publicly. [11]
>
>> * The number of staff is planned to more than double between 2009-10
>> and 2011-12, with almost 70% of that increase attributed to non-tech
>> staff
>
> The planned staffing increase from FY 2009 to FY 2012 is from 50 to
> 117 (+67). [12] In the same time period, tech staffing specifically is
> projected to grow from 22 to 50 (+28). That's 41.8% of the increase,
> not 30%. The tech share is higher in the current fiscal year, where it
> accounts for 56% of the planned staffing growth.
>
> Simply put, the Global Development and Community Department did not
> exist and were newly created; WMF has decided to tackle new areas of
> work that never happened before, as exemplified e.g. by the Summer of
> Research, the Global Education Program, etc.
>
>> And, let's be honest - aside from the $3m or so spent on hosting,
>
> The costs that you find labeled "Internet hosting" in the Annual Plan
> should never be confused with the cost of hosting Wikipedia. Those are
> two very different numbers (and we should make this clearer in the
> next plan). The "hosting cost" only covers bandwidth and operating
> expenses for running our sever farms.
>
> There's a separate cost center called "capital expenditures" which
> covers actual hardware purchases ($2.6M budgeted in 2011-12). To
> arrive at a meaningful "cost of hosting Wikipedia" (without any
> software improvements) one would have to back out of that experimental
> projects like Wikimedia Labs, but further add essential engineering
> staffing and contractors.
>
>> But the 11-12 plan called for the Visual Editor and
>> Wikimedia Labs to go into initial production mode in December 2011 -
>> which is in two days, without any recent announcements or updates
>> about either improvement. (Labs closed beta has 13 users in its active
>> list, defined as more than 1 edit in the last 30 days. Only 2 have
>> more than 10 edits in that period.).
>
> Updates can always be found in Wikimedia's monthly engineering report.
> The October report is here:
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/03/wikimedia-engineering-october-2011-report/
>
> As noted there, labs has been launched for first project-level access.
> Projects are listed here:
> https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Ask/-5B-5BResource-20Type::project-5D-5D/-3FMember
>
> The goal, as stated in the annual plan, was to "develop [a] sandbox
> for research, prototyping, and tools development, with initial
> hardware build-out and first project access by December 2011." This
> goal has been exceeded thanks to good progress at the NOLA hackathon
> which enabled us to give first individuals (including non-WMF
> staffers) access to labs instances before then. (Edit counts on the
> labsconsole wiki aren't a useful measure of activity as this is about
> providing virtualized hardware to volunteers, while the console merely
> serves as an administrative front-end.)
>
> We're now focusing on solidifying the architecture and infrastructure,
> adding toolserver-like DB replication capabilities, etc.
>
> As for the Visual Editor, we're still aiming to deploy a first
> user-facing prototype in December. As you can see by following the
> recent commits [13], the current codebase is now being merged into a
> MediaWiki extension which makes it possible to invoke the editor
> (initially only in a sandboxed mode).
>
> On the topic of diversity, I do think as Wikimedia engages in more and
> more specific ways to advance its mission (e.g. all the work with
> cultural institutions), we're creating new avenues for asking for
> support and receiving it. WMF is simply focusing its efforts on the
> one avenue which has always yielded the highest return: asking our
> users for support. As long as record numbers answer that call every
> year, it's legitimately the highest priority to focus on improving it
> further.
>
> All best,
> Erik
>
> [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_FAQ_2011_Final.pdf
> [2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/ac/FINAL_10_11From_KPMG.pdf
> [3] http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=glossary.word&word=Fundraising%20Efficiency&mid=1&cid=19&print=1
> [4] http://supportingadvancement.com/faq/cost_per_dollar_raised.htm
> [5] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf
> (p.53)
> [6] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Travel_Policy
> [7] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/2a/Wikimedia_Foundation_Compensation_Practices.pdf
> [8] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Fundraiser/Agreement
> [9] For example, via http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports
> [10] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-08-03#Appended:
> [11] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Plans_2011-2012
> [12] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf
> (p. 36)
> [13] http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?path=%2Ftrunk%2Fextensions%2FVisualEditor&title=Special%3ACode%2FMediaWiki
> --
> Erik Möller
> VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
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