Meetings/2009-06-23/Agenda/Fundraising

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Fundraising priorities

  • Andrew informally promised at the AGM that we'd cover administration via membership fees. Do we agree with this in principle as a board? Are we prepared for this to not hold in our first year?
  • What are we raising money for? To paraphrase my college's development director, it's a lot easier to get money out of people when there's a specific, well defined, closed off need. Ideally, something that donors will be able to see once completed.
  • Risk of chicken and egg situation: we can't do anything because we don't have the money, we can't fund-raise because we're not doing anything (or at least we're not doing anything that requires money).

Suggested plan of action for directed fundraising

  • Define a list of goals. E.g.:
    • Pay for Wikipedia for Schools to x% of all UK schools?
    • Pay for a new server to be installed in the WMF European server pool?
    • Etc. see Initiatives.
  • Produce a reasonable costing of each one.
  • Go to the press (Mike, Steve), the community (Paul) and large donors (Steve, Joe) with the concrete goal and what we need. (Only one goal at a time, well spaced to avoid overload.)

Non-directed fund-raising/membership increasing

  • Again, spam users on WP etc. See the list of active UK users here w:en:User:Cfp/Sandbox1.
  • Press-releases? (Tango's suggestion.) - I'm not convinced that we could get the press/blogosphere interested in a non-directed donation drive.
  • Events? Have a stand and bucket at tech events. (Joe?)
  • In street? Us having a guy on a busy street in a WP T-shirt soliciting for donations might actually work. For legal reasons I expect we have to be a charity first.
  • T-shirts etc. (Paul?)

Fund-raising committee

Tango's suggested creating a fund-raising committee. Seems sensible to me as there's a lot volunteers could do.

I'd suggest either letting Tango chair, with us stopping in when we're available, or having a weekly rotating chair-ship (me/Paul/Joe/Steve?), with Tango as committee leader for continuity.

Tango's proposed Terms of Reference

Scalability

Tango suggested we move to CiviCRM for donation and membership management. IMO it seems a little surplus to requirements at the moment and the time investment to get up and running seems not inconsiderable. There's some uncertainty over what the WMF will provide for us during the next donation drive. Ideally donators would go through their CRM system and then into our PayPal. PayPal gives quite a few transaction export options which I think are perfectly adequate for our requirements at present. If I got really bored I guess I could write a program to parse PayPal logs and use the info to populate the database I've currently got set-up for donators.

My suggestion is that if Tango wants to dedicate the time to get this off the ground, and if we can do it for free (using Mike's hosting account?) then we let him, but otherwise we see how we go with our current systems.

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