[Wikimedia-l] WMF core and non core expenses

[James Alexander]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 7:07 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does the merchandise store, which will cost USD 311000, have an ROI
> published somewhere?
>
> *Hey John,

I put a bit about the shop budget at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_budget#Shop after a request
from Nemo but I’m happy to try and gather more data or answer more
questions as they come up. Sorry again for the slow response on that thread
by the way, I was trying to get some questions answered on my side and it
got buried accidentally. The currently budgeted net ‘cost’ is actually
around 116k after you account for the budgeted income but obviously that
depends on how popular the store is and how much we are able to give away.
We’ve designed our business plan to ultimately focus on cost recovery with
some extra padding to give us resources to design new product etc. Some of
the costs in this budget are also about getting merchandise out to a wide
range of Wikimedia events.

The main focus of the shop isn’t as a revenue source as much as it’s about
trying to give away merchandise to the community and spreading brand
awareness. Members of both the editor and the reader community have asked
for some type of merchandise operation for a long time now and we wanted to
provide something that would provide that as affordably as possible (while
making sure we were keeping everything high quality).

The other goal of the shop is obviously to break even, including a hefty
amount of donated merchandise. We don’t expect that to happen instantly but
we’re going to be pushing the store more visibly to the public in the
coming weeks and months. It will take time, and we’ve got plans across a
number of different channels (not just WP itself) to increase visibility.

*
*We’ve already given thousands of dollars worth of shop merchandise away to
different groups but that has generally been for larger meetups,
conferences and events. This will continue but over the next week there are
two projects that are going to start rolling out, including an on-wiki
nomination process for individual community members to get awarded for
their service as well as a data driven experiential marketing campaign
(originally focusing on Social Media and tracked on meta). Keep an eye on
wikimedia-l for the individual nomination roll out and if you’re interested
in participating or keeping track of the marketing tests you can join the
Shop Team ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_merchandise/Shop_team<http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_merchandise/Shop_team>on
meta or directly to the google group at
https://groups.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/group/shopteam. We’ll also be
sending out the link to the meta tracking page as it gets fleshed out.*



-- 
James Alexander
Manager, Merchandise
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur