[Foundation-l] Relocation announcement

Sat Sep 22 16:35:42 UTC 2007

On 22/09/2007, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That's not quite how it works.  The donations that are coming in aren't
> > going to be changing, so WMF will still be getting most donations in
> > USD.  Except, because of the poor exchange rate, it is much more
> > expensive to do just about everything in the UK, including renting
> > flats, renting office space, buying food, buying bandwidth, etc.  The
> > donations wouldn't go nearly as far.
>
> If hosting is staying in the US, that's quite a lot of the expenses
> that will still be being paid in USD. And it's not that the pound is
> strong, it's the dollar that's weak, so any non-USD donations can be
> spent in the UK without problems. I haven't looked at the budgets and
> donation distributions to see how well it would work, but it shouldn't
> be too big a problem. Remember, WMF is non-profit - one of the biggest
> problems for profit making businesses is that they have to report
> profits in one currency, so even if the actual money isn't being
> converted, they still have to convert it on paper - the WMF doesn't
> have to worry about that.

I've just looked up the numbers. So far this year, 26% of donations
have been in something other than USD. In 2006, Salaries and Wages and
Operation, which are the only two things that would change currency
(and not all of them, at that), constituted 20% of total expenditure.
This is not a particularly accurate way of working out how a change of
currency would affect things, but I think it's close enough - the
change in currency would not be a serious issue.