Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-11-13/Special report
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I thought the summary chart was particularly useful and raised it for Wikimedia UK member's attention at wmuk:Water cooler#WMF assessment of WMUK's $707,000 bid.
For Wikimedia UK, the FDC process clarified that less than 48% of donated funds go to projects with outcomes in line with the charity's mission, the rest of the funds going on administration such lawyers, employment costs, rent, and local fund-raising.‡. Despite asking several times for the cost of administration to be published by chapters, very few publish anything like these figures, or make them impossibly complex to work out and strongly resist the proposal that this become a hard measurement; so Wikimedia UK was not alone in making this tough to calculate.
Speaking as a past Chapters Association Chair and Wikimedia UK Chair, with a good awareness of the value and organization of chapters, if there is one key improvement I would like to see the FDC put in place, it would be to firmly insist that all chapters submitting proposals make public an easy to understand ratio of "administration : fund-raising : programmes" so that anyone can compare the efficiency of one Chapter with another. There would be obvious benefits to learning from each other, and to judge if our "maturity model" inevitably means increasing employee numbers and indefinitely increasing demands for more funding, or whether organic and (unpaid) volunteer-centric ways of growing Chapters can become a strategic goal.
- ‡ Reports do not count the cost of the WMF doing its global fundraising which creates the main income for the chapter, as this is effectively a "free" service to Wikimedia UK regardless of the equivalent employee costs. The declared fund-raising costs are in addition to this core cost, so if efficiency were measured movement-wide, it would fall significantly below 50%. --Fæ (talk) 15:53, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
- Hello Tony1, thanks for the article. I'd like to make one correction, which is that the FDC recommendation to the Board is due on 1 December, and the Board will make its decision on 1 Jan 2014. I see it has been documented incorrectly on the FDC Portal, and we'll make that change. Thanks for making the correction to the article. KLove (WMF) (talk) 21:36, 16 November 2013 (UTC)
Competitiveness is good, but sometimes the rating given by staff who doesn't know much is like asking a fish to climb a tree... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.97.61.64 (talk) 12:56, 17 November 2013 (UTC)