The more I read the Board's letter the more difficult I find it to interpret. There's one reading on which it says only a few (albeit important) things that aren't already in the 2011 Fundraising Agreements. There is another reading in which it says that actually no chapters will be participating in this Autumn's fundraiser, as actually none of them have hit every single deadline from the 2010 agreement. (For the sake of balance - the WMF also missed one of its own deadlines ;-) ) So thank you Phoebe for your insight on the Board's thinking, but more insight would be good.
However there are four particular points I would mention: 1) *Transparency and accountability by chapters*. I wholeheartedly agree that Chapters' performance in terms of reporting and accountability has not been great on the whole. There also seem to be a number of chapters who participated in the 2010 Fundraiser for whom it is very difficult to find any indication of how much has been raised during 2011 or what the money has been spent on. Simply in my role as a member of the community, this is concerning, and I agree that the Foundation board needs to take this issue seriously. 2) *New chapters and funds*. I also agree that a small, new chapter has better things to do than spend its time working out how to handle online payments and hold donor data. There is in any case a threshold in the Fundraising Agreement on how much a chapter can seek to raise if it is taking part in the fundraiser for the first time - $50,000 if I remember rightly. To be honest the prospect of a $50,000 grant from the Foundation for much less work than participating in the fundraiser would be attractive. (Though of course this alternative grant system isn't actually set up, which makes it difficult to examine it) 3) *Tax-deductibility.* There is a significant change in the Foundation board's language between the Fundraising Agreement - which says chapters must be tax-deductible non-profits "where applicable and obtainable" - and the language in this letter. Some chapters operate in countries which have no concept of tax-deductibility. Some operate in countries where it's impossible to reconcile tax-deductibility with being a Chapter. I think it would be a very serious mistake for the Foundation to unilaterally decide that no chapter in one of these countries will ever participate in the Fundraiser. If that is what the Foundation have decided then I think that is going far beyond the action the Foundation needs to take to exercise its duty of care towards donors. I also think that it would fundamentally alter the relationship between the Foundation and the chapters, and not in a good way. 4) *The value of donors.* The Foundation talks a lot about donor stewardship, but stewardship goes far beyond accountability and transparency. What we as a movement ought to be doing is building an ongoing relationship with the people who are generous enough to give us money, and sharing the Wikimedia vision with them. This means having the kind of donor communication programme that almost any nonprofit can tell you about. Currently I don't believe the Foundation tries to do this - it ought to - but I think it is actually something which is much better done by chapters where those chapters have the resources to do so. The benefits of this kind of "active stewardship" are several... - more people who "get" Wikimedia rather than just responding to a banner they see on Wikipedia - more recurring income for the movement not linked to the annual fundraiser (all nonprofits love recurring income because it's consistent and reliable - though the mechanics of actually giving recurring gifts are quite specific to individual nations) - outreach - when WMUK sent an email to our 2010 donors a month or two ago, we got dozens of responses from people interested in getting involved (even though we hadn't really asked!) - including one from a curator at a key museum we were trying to get links to for our GLAM outreach programme. So basically our donors are a massive and under-used resource for the movement in both financial and non-financial terms. I get the impression that some people think the only benefit of Chapters handling donor data is that donors get tax receipts. That is definitely not the case and it if that's the only thing we care about then that is a massive missed opportunity for the movement. Regards, Chris Keating User:The Land Wikimedia UK Board member & fundraising lead _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l