Chief Executive Report 2016-03-12

Board Meeting March 2016 Chief Executive's Report

Overview

I am now five months into my post at Wikimedia UK and feel like I am developing my understanding of the organisation and broadening my relationships with the wider sector. This quarter saw Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, which was an opportunity for us to celebrate with our volunteers and editors at an event attended by about 60 volunteers and editors as well as Jimmy Wales. We also secured significant broadcast media coverage for Wikimedia UK during the week of the birthday.

We have ended the financial year in a significantly better position than budgeted, with a deficit of around £6000. As explored later in this report and in the financial papers, whilst some of this reduction represents actual cost savings, some of it was also connected with a drop in programme activity in 2015, as highlighted by the financial variances at the end of Quarter Three. Overall however, I think we can be pleased by our achievements against our targets for the year, given the challenging circumstances during 2015; and in particular I am encouraged by the activities in Quarter Four and the forthcoming plans for the programme.

I think it’s a great indication of the growing success and profile of our programmes that we currently have Wikimedians in Residence at Bodleian Libraries, Museums Galleries Scotland, National Library of Wales and University of Edinburgh, with the interviews for Wellcome Library taking place shortly before the board meeting. Both of the latter two residencies are fully funded by the institutions themselves. We are also working in partnership with a wide range of prestigious institutions - albeit at a smaller scale - through our participation in the international Art + Feminism programme. These include Dulwich Picture Gallery, Goldsmiths, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Leeds Central Library, Southbank Centre and Tate Britain.

A number of areas of work that I am leading on have moved forward in the last three months, including strategic planning, communications and advocacy. The programmes team has also been delivering a lot of valuable work with volunteers, including high quality training led by Midas but developed in collaboration with the team, and the volunteer survey. Other areas still need more development, including membership, and fundraising will be a key area of priority for me over the next quarter.

Planning

Thanks again for all your energy and positive input into the away day in December, and for your feedback on the draft strategic framework and business plan that I shared with you in February. We will be discussing these documents as a separate agenda item during this meeting, and during March there will a consultation with the community on the new strategic framework (but not the full business plan). I’m hoping that any final changes to the plans can be agreed by the end of the month, by email or phone as necessary, in order to achieve the following outputs:

• A clear, concise strategic framework to 2019, which outlines our vision, mission, values, outcomes, strategic aims and objectives and major programmes, which can be shared with the community, partners and funders and used as the basis of both our communications and fundraising strategies
• A three year business plan which puts the strategy in context, articulating the external context and drivers, planned priorities, programmes and themes for the three year period and internal resources including staffing and funding
• A delivery plan which details our activities in 2016/17

Once these documents have been finalised I will lead on the development of a new communications strategy for the charity, with significant support and input from the new Communications Co-ordinator as well as the rest of the team, trustees and volunteers. A draft of this strategy should be ready to present to the board at the June meeting.

Programmes Update

This quarter, rather than incorporating the programme update into my report, this has been produced as a separate document by Daria, alongside the very comprehensive quarterly report card. Whilst the overall impact report for the year (as required by the Foundation) won’t be ready in time for the meeting, the report card gives a good indication of achievements against targets for the year. Daria will be giving an oral presentation during the meeting that looks briefly at the year that has just ended, but with more of a focus on plans for programmes in 2016/17.

Staff and Board Update

As the annual review cycle has now been brought in line with our financial year and annual planning cycle, I held annual appraisals with Daria and Davina in February; both of which were very positive. Davina has also scheduled an annual review for Richard Symonds. For newer staff members, and those who changed roles within the last year, the first annual review will be in early 2017, as they have all recently had comprehensive review meetings at the end of their probation periods.

Our monthly staff meetings are going well and in February, Daria and I facilitated a day-long meeting to support the development of the three year business plan and the activity plan for 2016-17. In addition, most of the team attended a project development workshop that I organised in January, delivered free of charge by the poet and creative facilitator Nick Field.

I’m very pleased to confirm that we have appointed a new Communications Co-ordinator, following an external recruitment process that resulted in 28 applications and a very strong field. Many thanks to Alastair McCapra, Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute for Public Relations and Wikimedia UK volunteer, for inputting into the recruitment process including joining the second interviews, and for Daria for spending a significant amount of time in shortlisting and interviewing for the post with me.

The successful candidate, John Lubbock, is currently working as a freelance researcher, journalist and filmmaker, and a Parliamentary Committee meeting reporter for DeHavilland. John's previous work background includes stints as a Research and Advocacy Officer for the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, a Community Organiser in Brixton, and an administrator in the research department of the Imperial War Museum; so he has a varied background, and brings a strong set of skills, experience and interests to the role. John has also been a supporter of WMUK and volunteered as speaker liaison during Wikimania 2014.

Communications and Advocacy

As reported above, following the departure of Stevie in September and the creation of a new Communications Co-ordinator post, we have appointed John Lubbock who will be joining the organisation in late March. We will therefore have had a vacancy in this function within the organisation for more than half a year in total. Whilst this has undoubtedly had an impact on our capacity to communicate effectively with external audiences, I’d like to record my thanks to the programmes team, particularly Richard Nevell, for supporting communications activities including maintaining our social media presence and producing the newsletter.

As previously highlighted to the board, the 15th birthday of Wikipedia in January enabled us to secure significant broadcast media coverage for Wikimedia UK, with staff and volunteers interviewed about the work of the charity on BBC London Radio, BBC Radio Cymru, BBC World Service, ITV News and Sky News. Whilst it’s hard to produce exact audience figures for this coverage, the combined audience will have been in the hundreds of thousands. The 15th birthday party event itself, held at Newspeak House in London, was also a very positive, celebratory occasion, which photographs that capture the diversity of our stakeholders in terms of age, gender and ethnicity.

In February, I arranged for Dimi Dimitrov to visit London and facilitate a planning session looking at the potential for UK-based advocacy work, with a focus on public policy and legislation. Michael, Daria, Stuart and I attended this meeting from Wikimedia UK, along with the volunteers Owen Blacker - founder of Open Rights Group (ORG) - and Wendy Grossman, who is on the Advisory Council of ORG. The meeting was very productive and we now have a set of key priorities within our public policy work, which are being incorporated into our plans for forthcoming activities.

Following the decision at the last board meeting to bring our funding for the Open Coalition to an end, Daria and I discussed with Bekka how we could bring this work to a close in a meaningful way. We agreed that in the remaining time left, Bekka would produce an impact report reflecting on the whole project, would finalise the toolkit for open space practitioners (which had been a key area of her work), and would bring the static content on the dedicated website to a point where it could be a valuable resource, to be maintained by Wikimedia UK. This work is now nearly completed and we will be communicating about this with stakeholders and interested individuals and organisations soon. I have also been in touch with our key partners in the Coalition and had very useful Skype calls with senior staff from Mozilla and Creative Commons, which have opened up potential future collaborations. I successfully applied to give a presentation on Wikimedia at the Open Education Resources 2016 Conference in Edinburgh this April, where I will hopefully be joined by our trustee Josie Fraser. This will be a great opportunity to make connections within the education sector as well as to raise the profile of Wikimedia UK in the context of education and cultural heritage, and perhaps attract some more volunteers to the Education Working Group that Josie is convening. I have also been invited to speak at the Women in Creative Industries Day on 9th March, as part of the prestigious Southbank Centre’s WOW - Women of the World Festival. WMUK will receive a small fee for my presentation, which will focus on gender issues.

The discussion with Heritage Lottery Fund in January went very well, with Michael and I meeting Karen Brookfield, Deputy Director (Strategy) and Fiona Talbott (Head of Museums, Libraries and Archives) at Heritage Lottery Fund. HLF currently requires organisations receiving funding for digital projects to license works under a CC-by-NC license; but they were unaware of some of the implications of this, for example that these works can therefore not be used on Wikipedia or in an educational context when people pay for tuition (therefore including most university courses). Karen and Fiona were very open to the conversation and might consider changing their policy, however their trustees and some of the other staff are more cautious. Following this meeting and at Karen’s suggestion, I am setting up a meeting with a number of organisations including Arts Council England, BBC, BFI, Creative Commons and Wellcome Library, to try to develop a sector-wide move to the use of more open licences.

Funding and Fundraising

I have further developed the draft fundraising paper following feedback from the last board meeting and am presenting the strategy for approval today. The draft objectives for fundraising that I presented in December have been refined and incorporated into the delivery plan for the year; keeping the strategy itself quite high level.

I’m pleased to report that in February, we received a legacy gift of £5000 from a Mrs Kathleen Weldon. We aren’t aware of any prior connection between Mrs Wheldon and the charity, as a donor or otherwise, and as an unrestricted gift I have been happy to accept this on behalf of the charity, as per our donor acceptance policy.

Fundraising will be a key area of focus for me over the next few months, as we have a challenging fundraising target and are operating with a degree of risk within both our current key sources of support; the foundation, and individual donations. It has been challenging to carve out enough time for this work in the past few months for various reasons, but I’m confident that I will be able to focus more on this going forward, as a number of things are now in place to make that easier.

Volunteers and Members

As mentioned briefly above, the programmes team has been working hard to re-engage with our volunteers over the past quarter, with initiatives including new pilot training opportunities, the development of a training module for new trainers leading editing events, and the identification of a number of ‘volunteer roles’, which we hope will make it easier for people to understand how and where they could become involved in our work. The newsletter sent out in December seems to have been well received, and also seemed to prompt a number of membership renewals. In the new year, we circulated the annual volunteer skills and engagement survey, designed by Richard Nevell with input from the rest of the team, and the results of this have been drawn together into an interesting and insightful report by Richard. Pleasingly, of the 69 people that responded (19% of those surveyed), 80% would recommend us to a friend and the same percentage want to continue volunteering with us.

I’m afraid I have not moved forward with membership as anticipated at the last meeting. However, given the AGM in July, this will certainly be another area of focus over the next few months.

Key meetings and events attended

• London Wiki meet up
• Meeting with Stevie Benton
• Skype call with Liam Wyatt, Member of the Funds Dissemination Committee
• Meeting with Ed Saperia
• Volunteer engagement training
• Skype call with Bekka Khan
• Meeting with Jon Davies
• Skype call with Michelle Thorne, Director of Global Strategy at Mozilla
• Meeting with the Deputy Director and Head of Museums and Archives at HLF
• Meeting with the Directors of the Institute of Ideas
• Skype call with Jane Park, senior leader at Creative Commons
• Regular Chapters TelCo (including call with Lila Tretikov)
• Skype call with Katy Love
• Advocacy planning session/working group meeting
• WOW Festival (speaker)