On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 5:59 PM, rupert THURNER <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
