[Foundation-l] donate to Wikimedia Deutschland
Jens Ropers
ropers at ropersonline.com
Sun Jan 9 19:15:38 UTC 2005
Leaving aside Daniel's concerns over how Wikimedia Deutschland
currently uses the dough (somebody from Wikimedia Deutschland should
answer that), Walter's email is an important reminder that we really
should get going about offering the EU standard bank transfer to EU
donors.
What we need to provide so people can do these transactions:
* our BIC (Bank Identification Code)
* our IBAN (International Bank Account Number)
* the full international postal address of our bank (because some banks
want this data as a fallback mechanism, in case there's probs w/ the
BIC/IBAN data.
Note that the full postal address is currently missing from
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden.html.
EU donors (even if they are totally unfamiliar w/ EU standard
transactions) can then take that info to their bank and get going
sending the money.
The donation page should explain a bit about EU standard bank transfers
-- because EU standard transactions are still fairly new and not even
all EU citizens know about them. (I think I was one of the first people
to do them at my bank, but I now do one every one or two months -- easy
peasy.) It should be made clear that these transactions CANNOT, by EU
law, cost more than national transactions and that every EU bank has to
offer them. In other words, for anyone with an EU current account, an
an EU transaction is probably the cheapest way. (Admittedly, in terms
of convenience credit cards still have an edge, because EU standard
transactions require the user to do the transaction through their bank
(instead of punching in a few numbers on our site) and not all banks
let their customers do EU standard transactions online yet.
Pretty redundant info, just in case:
EU standard transactions are bank transfers between two EU banks. The
donor needs an EU bank account and we need one. They're cheap, they're
''relatively'' fast (still can take up to a few days till funds fully
register in the recipient's account) and once you've got the above
data, EU transactions are quite painless (as opposed to any other
international transaction).
It really, truly does not matter what EU bank account we use for
accepting EU standard transactions. It could be a current account in
any EU country and we DON'T need an account in each EU country from
that perspective. The only advantage to having multiple EU current
accounts would be that donors from a respective country could then also
use their "old" national bank transfer mechanism to donate, and they
might be more familiar with that. So maybe to offer separate accounts
for the bigger countries would be good -- and, yes, it's especially
good to have/offer a bank account with Germany, because German's mostly
just don't get^W, sorry, do credit cards and the country's the most
populous of the EU.
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
www.ropersonline.com
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