[Foundation-l] Fundraising is for men

Wed Nov 30 06:03:05 UTC 2011

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Nathan,

a bit OT from the thread title, but just clarifying a couple of points:

> * The WMF spends over $2 million on fundraising alone

In FY 2010-11, WMF raised $23M in contributions, not counting $
restricted to future time periods. In the same time period, $2.142M
expenses were allocated to fundraising, including $556K in credit card
processing fees. [1][2] That's altogether less than 10 cents on the
dollar, which by the standards of charity watchdog organizations, is
qualified as an excellent fundraising efficiency (cf. [3][4]). This
includes very different types of fundraising activity (grant-writing
and grant management, donor cultivation, usability testing of credit
card forms, etc.).

> * The travel budget is nearly $2m (that's right, two million dollars
> in travel costs)

The 2011-12 travel budget is $1.742M [5]. A little bit of detail as to
how this breaks out is included in the Audited Financials FAQ [1], but
in a nutshell:

* WMF is a global organization and is doing work on the ground in many
corners of the world, in partnership with chapters where they exist,
and WMF staff routinely have to travel internationally as a normal
part of their day-to-day work;
* WMF sponsors volunteer travel extensively, for Wikimania, for
hackathons, for WMF site visits and meetings, and for many other
purposes;
* Many contractors work for WMF from all over the world, and it's part
of the cost of doing business in this way that you bring people
together for face-to-face meetings on a regular basis.

Travel is regulated by the WMF travel policy which ensures that
individual travel expenses are not excessive or profligate. [6]

> * 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 2010-11 staffing budget is $13.3M. [5] Staffing costs include
payroll taxes, recruiting costs, and benefits, and of course pay bands
for different roles vary significantly, but are consistent with
similar non-profit organizations, i.e. below the market rate paid at
for-profit companies.

More background about the guiding principles of Wikimedia's
compensation practices can be found in [7].

> * The last fundraiser sent over $6 million to chapters, with little
> insight or transparency into how that money is spent

Chapters processing donations in the 2010 fundraiser were required, as
part of their participation, to commit to various obligations. See [8]
for the Wikimedia UK agreement as an example. Specifically with regard
to transparency, WMF, community, and chapters have worked together to
ensure that key information about chapter activities and financial
information can be easily found. [9]

At its July 2011 Board meeting, the WMF Board of Trustees agreed to a
letter regarding fundraising accountability [10] which further
emphasized principles of accountability, transparency, and fairness,
and led to shifting chapters increasingly towards applying for grants
to fund program work. Program plans both for chapters receiving grants
and processing payments through the fundraiser are shared and reviewed
publicly. [11]

> * 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

The planned staffing increase from FY 2009 to FY 2012 is from 50 to
117 (+67). [12] In the same time period, tech staffing specifically is
projected to grow from 22 to 50 (+28). That's 41.8% of the increase,
not 30%. The tech share is higher in the current fiscal year, where it
accounts for 56% of the planned staffing growth.

Simply put, the Global Development and Community Department did not
exist and were newly created; WMF has decided to tackle new areas of
work that never happened before, as exemplified e.g. by the Summer of
Research, the Global Education Program, etc.

> And, let's be honest - aside from the $3m or so spent on hosting,

The costs that you find labeled "Internet hosting" in the Annual Plan
should never be confused with the cost of hosting Wikipedia. Those are
two very different numbers (and we should make this clearer in the
next plan). The "hosting cost" only covers bandwidth and operating
expenses for running our sever farms.

There's a separate cost center called "capital expenditures" which
covers actual hardware purchases ($2.6M budgeted in 2011-12). To
arrive at a meaningful "cost of hosting Wikipedia" (without any
software improvements) one would have to back out of that experimental
projects like Wikimedia Labs, but further add essential engineering
staffing and contractors.

> 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.).

Updates can always be found in Wikimedia's monthly engineering report.
The October report is here:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/03/wikimedia-engineering-october-2011-report/

As noted there, labs has been launched for first project-level access.
Projects are listed here:
https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Ask/-5B-5BResource-20Type::project-5D-5D/-3FMember

The goal, as stated in the annual plan, was to "develop [a] sandbox
for research, prototyping, and tools development, with initial
hardware build-out and first project access by December 2011." This
goal has been exceeded thanks to good progress at the NOLA hackathon
which enabled us to give first individuals (including non-WMF
staffers) access to labs instances before then. (Edit counts on the
labsconsole wiki aren't a useful measure of activity as this is about
providing virtualized hardware to volunteers, while the console merely
serves as an administrative front-end.)

We're now focusing on solidifying the architecture and infrastructure,
adding toolserver-like DB replication capabilities, etc.

As for the Visual Editor, we're still aiming to deploy a first
user-facing prototype in December. As you can see by following the
recent commits [13], the current codebase is now being merged into a
MediaWiki extension which makes it possible to invoke the editor
(initially only in a sandboxed mode).

On the topic of diversity, I do think as Wikimedia engages in more and
more specific ways to advance its mission (e.g. all the work with
cultural institutions), we're creating new avenues for asking for
support and receiving it. WMF is simply focusing its efforts on the
one avenue which has always yielded the highest return: asking our
users for support. As long as record numbers answer that call every
year, it's legitimately the highest priority to focus on improving it
further.

All best,
Erik

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_FAQ_2011_Final.pdf
[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/ac/FINAL_10_11From_KPMG.pdf
[3] http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=glossary.word&word=Fundraising%20Efficiency&mid=1&cid=19&print=1
[4] http://supportingadvancement.com/faq/cost_per_dollar_raised.htm
[5] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf
(p.53)
[6] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Travel_Policy
[7] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/2a/Wikimedia_Foundation_Compensation_Practices.pdf
[8] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Fundraiser/Agreement
[9] For example, via http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports
[10] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-08-03#Appended:
[11] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Plans_2011-2012
[12] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/37/2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf
(p. 36)
[13] http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?path=%2Ftrunk%2Fextensions%2FVisualEditor&title=Special%3ACode%2FMediaWiki
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate