Fundraising data should be more transparent
- Lodewijk Gelauff (Effeietsanders) has been a Dutch Wikipedian since 2005. He was founder and a board member of Wikimedia Nederland (2006–11), former member of the Affiliations Committee and former international team member and current jury coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments.
Fundraising season is coming up for the Wikimedia Foundation! If you live in an English-speaking country, you will probably be asked to donate the price of a rather expensive cup of coffee to keep our servers running. Fundraising has been successful for many years, making use of the goodwill and appreciation of Wikipedia's readership. And that’s a good thing.
At the same time, a greater effort could (and should) be made by the fundraising department to support volunteers throughout the movement, by improving communication and sharing more country-level data and information. This could help to avoid conflicts between the Foundation and volunteers, and instead could facilitate them in their public-facing and outreach activities.
It's generally accepted that Wikipedia stands or falls through the involvement of its volunteers. Volunteers write articles, improve them, categorize them, make them look good, correct spelling mistakes and improve grammar, and do all of the editing that goes into creating an encyclopedia. Similarly, volunteers make up the bulk of the ecosystem that supports the Wikimedia movement as a whole.
This volunteer capacity is a great opportunity in many ways. With a movement of 80,000 volunteers, we can tap into local expertise–through the affiliated organizations and editing communities. Until a few years ago, the fundraising efforts made effective use of this expertise.[1] Nowadays, volunteer involvement seems to be limited to translating banner messages and description pages, if that.
This is a pity, because I strongly believe that fundraising could more effectively benefit from volunteer involvement: volunteers could help by coming up with alternatives for this cup-of-coffee metaphor that may work much better in their own country, could point out effective payment methods, or identify missing information on the fundraising pages.[2] They could improve the cultural connection of the fundraising messaging.
But this is not all. For volunteers across the Wikimedia ecosystem to operate optimally, they need tools and information. In this piece, I focus specifically on two ways in which the organization of fundraising could be improved, to facilitate volunteers throughout the movement better.
- ^ For example, from 2010 through 2012 there was an active (closed) mailing list coordinating the fundraising efforts with volunteers, and a number of chapters had an active role in fundraising within their country, choosing effective language in collaboration with local fundraising experts, hosting locally relevant payment methods, and handling questions from donors.
- ^ It should be noted that the Fundraising department did ask for banner suggestions.