[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Question: How much does administration in Chapters cost the Wikimedia movement?

[Chris Keating]

I would like to suggest a bit of a contrary view.

Rather than focusing on understanding our costs in detail, I would like to
understand our benefits in detail.

The idea of an "acceptable" fundraising costs ratio is, to be honest, a bit
of a red herring. In general for a mature organisation it is easy to reduce
the fundraising costs ratio, by raising less money (fundraising
opportunities tend to exhibit diminishing marginal returns). I am a donor
fundraising manager for a British university (and before that a charity and
a political party). In any of those jobs I could have recommend terminating
all of my projects and sacking my entire team, and doing that would reduce
the ratio of fundraising costs. It would not be in the best long-term
interests of  the organisations or their beneficiaries. In practice,
growing long-term income tends to involve investment.


"Administrative overhead", too, while perhaps useful to know, may not be
not useful if it's a target to be clamped down on. See for instance this
piece of research, which shows that charities with the minimum
"administrative costs" are actually less effective at delivering their
missions:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/09/why-ranking-charities-by-administrative-expenses-is-a-bad-idea/

So I am relatively relaxed that we are not great at measuring programme vs
administrative expenditure.

I am not at all relaxed, however, that we as a movement are not great at
measuring the impact of our organisations. I found Frank's session at the
Wikimedia Conference really helpful, and I think the FDC framework can
really help with this as well. But please let's focus on defining the
impact of what we're doing before we worry about what's overhead and what's
not.

Chris
Wikimedia UK Chair (speaking personally as usual)




On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:

> > It is disappointing that no organization has readily come forward in
> > reply to my original question with their pre-calculated
> > "program:fundraising:administrative cost ratios" (I love this way of
> > conceiving of the ratio) it would be really handy to be discussing a
> > real case at this moment. I will have a bit more time in a couple of
> > weeks, at which point I will happily dig into the standards you have
> > linked to, and then pull these out of an example past report, if I can
> > find a good set of numbers in one of the large chapters (WMDE, WMUK?)
> > or even the WMF, so that we can discuss the meaningfulness of starting
> > to make this ratio a top level indicator for all our movement
> > organizations.
>
> If you want, we can try with Wikimedia Polska. Here there is a rough table:
>
>
> http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/U%C5%BCytkownik:Polimerek/Spraw_zarzadu#Finanse
>
> just showing our ratio of operational costs and other parts of our
> costs for 2012.
>
> In our case the operational costs are well defined by general rules of
> accounting, but they differ from your definition - i.e. it does not
> cover all salaries if they are integral part of the projects, but does
> cover salaries of our secretary and accountant. But for example it
> also covers cost of our toolsever and internet domains...
>
> IMHO the general reporting could be like this:
> *General operational/office costs (salaries of office workers, cost of
> maintaining office, cost of legal stuff, cost of travels and meetings
> of workers and members of the boards and other "decisive bodies")
> *Technical infrastructure costs (servers etc. + salaries of
> technicians who maintain it )
> *Costs of projects and special programs (overall, salaries, meetings,
> travel, technical, others) - maybe spread by a type of program (ie.
> producing content, software improvement, outreach, promotion, others)
>
> +
>
> *General info about overall costs of all salaries (easy to calculate
> and define).
> *General info about costs of all travel reimbursements (easy to
> calculate as well)
> *General info about costs of all meetings and conferences.
>
>
> --
> Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
> http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
> http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
> http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz
>
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