[Wikimedia-l] deliberately lowered fundraising growth rate (was: Fundraising updates?)

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 7:07 PM, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

> donors who expect the Foundation to prepare for contingency

James,

While your statistical comments were well-informed and helpful, your
comments in this thread are less so, and your frustrated approach - while
presuming to represent others - is not very helpful at all.

As you know, our contingency allocation (6 months of reserve) has not
changed this year.

As you may not realize (perhaps because of the way fundraising was split up
this year), we are still fundraising towards a revenue target of $46.1M as
per the annual plan.


> > Fundraising targets have been set to match our projected needs for
>
> the year, for the past few years.
>
> abandonment of the Strategic Plan


You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

While this coming year (midway through) is a good time to revisit the
strategic plan and begin iterating on it, our strategy has not changed.
 And annual plans are not the same as a strategic plan; they are tactical.
 Trying to pursue all parts of the strategy at the same time may not be the
most effective way to realize any of them.  I suspect that our core
strategy goals will all be furthered by improving the focus (and capacity
to focus) of the Foundation.


> , after the July 2012-3 Annual Plan goal was set at $46.1 million,
> which itself was substantially reduced after the Chief Revenue Officer
> reported


What gave you that idea?  It is wrong.

See for instance, page 16 of the aforementioned strategic plan:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c0/WMF_StrategicPlan2011_spreads.pdf

The projected growth rate has hardly been altered in the past years.


>  > As to your specific concerns, I encourage fleshing them out as part of a
> > discussion of next year's budget.  You may find a helpful counterpoint to
> > your own anxiety in the discussion there, driven by people who feel that
> > our current budget is both too high and not directed at our bottlenecks.
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Budget
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget#2012-13
>
> I have looked through those, and they do not seem to be a traditional
> accounts-based budget, or even a discussion of specific budget line
> items. Which...


I would be interested to see and participate in specific discussions about
future budgets there, on Meta - including the comparative advantages of
accounts-based budgets or line items.

This is my last response in this thread, however.

SJ