[Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF

Thu Oct 8 18:17:02 UTC 2009

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/10/8 Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com>:
>   
>> Despite an overall three-star rating (out of four), WMF was only rated two
>> stars for Organization Efficency.  This is described by Charity Navigator as
>> "Meets or nearly meets industry standards but underperforms most charities
>> in its Cause".  The Charity Navigator site further states:
>>     
> The WMF is unique in being so massively volunteer driven. The WMF
> exists to run the servers and handle the admin, almost everything else
> is done by volunteers and doesn't appear on the income statement. It's
> inevitable that the WMF will spend a lot of its money on admin. If you
> include volunteer time on the income statement, even at a nominal rate
> of $1/hr or something, then we would be spending almost all our
> resources on programmes.
>   
This is true enough in general, though as mentioned there are other 
nonprofits that also benefit from volunteer resources on a large scale. 
But that's often not something a ratings site will consider in 
determining "similarity" of organizations, when it even gets beyond 
evaluation with one-size-fits-all formulas. Not that these issues are 
easily reduced to formulas, as we have already found in various settings 
where it's a challenge to adequately express the scope of what Wikimedia 
volunteers do.

We do pay attention to the efficiency of operations and how funds are 
spent, not merely for the sake of appearances but as something valuable 
in its own right. With that in mind, it's more useful to look directly 
at ways of achieving greater efficiency than to debate how important it 
is for us to meet arbitrary standards. So in that sense I'd actually 
consider arguing over the propriety of covering meal expenses, even with 
the possible cultural insensitivity involved, a more valuable discussion.

--Michael Snow