[Foundation-l] Fundraising is for men

Tue Nov 29 23:42:48 UTC 2011

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 5:59 PM, rupert THURNER
<rupert.thurner at gmail.com> wrote:
> fyi, in switzerland there are 2 mio readers and below 10000 donors ... this
> means more than 99% are not giving money.

Which is, in my opinion, fine. The Foundation receives a pretty large
amount of donated money, as non-profit organizations relying on
donations go. The ethos of the WMF implicitly accepts, even
encourages, the active use of WMF projects by people who could never
afford to donate. There are, additionally, some questions about the
way money is spent:

* The WMF spends over $2 million on fundraising alone
* The travel budget is nearly $2m (that's right, two million dollars
in travel costs)
* The budget includes a whopping $14 million on staffing costs (at the
planned 117 number of staff, that is nearly $120k per staff member)
* The last fundraiser sent over $6 million to chapters, with little
insight or transparency into how that money is spent
* The number of staff is planned to more than double between 2009-10
and 2011-12, with almost 70% of that increase attributed to non-tech
staff

And, let's be honest - aside from the $3m or so spent on hosting, it
can be difficult to make the argument to new donors that other
expenditures are bearing immediate fruit. Of course, many non-tech
programs can take a lot of time and money before they have a
measurable impact. But the 11-12 plan called for the Visual Editor and
Wikimedia Labs to go into initial production mode in December 2011 -
which is in two days, without any recent announcements or updates
about either improvement. (Labs closed beta has 13 users in its active
list, defined as more than 1 edit in the last 30 days. Only 2 have
more than 10 edits in that period.). All in all, that's a lot of money
for a set of results that have limited tangibility outside the WMF
itself.

So, the upshot is that the Foundation spends money like an
organization with a lot of money - and nowadays, that is exactly what
it is. That presents a less compelling story for new donors, and
suggests that there are other organizational priorities more pressing
than the diversity of donors.

~Nathan