2009 Winter Fundraiser
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This page describes the plans for the joint winter fundraiser between Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation will be putting banners on its projects asking for donations - donors from the UK will be given the choice of donating to us.
The legal framework for the fundraiser will be in the Chapter Fundraising Agreement
Also see Fundraising.
- WMUK Lead
- Tom Dalton (Head of Fundraising)
Fundraising back-end
To be developed by Tom Dalton, liaising with Tom Holden (ultimately responsible for the donations) and Mike Peel (technical aspects) with creative design by TBD?
- Current system is to have donations via Paypal; the donations page is at Donate.
- Need to have a substantially better donations page (using CiviCRM rather than a wiki page?), and form via PayPal
- Need to have a donors privacy policy
- Need to have sufficient details to follow up later to ask for Gift Aid (currently can't ask for Gift Aid declaration at the same time as the donations are received)
- Need to know where the donation is coming from (is it via the WMF projects, or separate?)
- Need to write thank you emails
- Need to form a plan for handling repeat donations
- Way of easily subscribing donors to the newsletter if they want
- PayPal, cheques, bank transfers, money orders
- Easy way of becoming a member at the same time as donating? Need to decide how easy we want it to be.
Surrounding publicity
To be lead by Mike Peel, with assistance from <add your name here>?
- Blog post
- Twitter posts
- Press release? Highlight initiatives that would be funded
- Radio(/TV) interviews
- Radio/newspaper/magazine adverts (to be run later in the fundraiser, using funds from start of fundraiser?)
- Discussion on local news programs (e.g. Northwest Tonight with Gordon Burns and Ranvir Singh)
Use of funds
Under the Fundraising Agreement, Wikimedia UK must provide:
When drafting the text of this schedule, it is important that we retain the flexibility to change plans if necessary. We must be careful that we do not create "designated funds", which the chapter is legally obliged to use for a particular item. Given that the Agreement asked for "events, programs and/or expenditures", we may retain the maximum flexibility by "expenditures" only.
The text should be drafted to inspire people to give to us and to give generously, stressing the importance of having an active UK chapter.
The items listed should be sufficient to cover the upper end of our range of expected income. The 2008 Fundraiser raised $266,000 [1] (about £175,000 at average December 2008 rates) [2]. Assuming 50% give direct to the Foundation and 50% give via us, that would raise around £87,500 - 8,750 people giving an average of £10 each. [3] In order to cater to the top end of the range, we should have sufficient items to cover £100,000. I have not assumed any income from Gift Aid as we are not expecting a response from the Charity Commission until early December. If we do get approval then we will be able to reclaim a further 28% on the donation (or 14% if the Wikimedia Foundation donation is disallowed under UK Tax rules)
![[1]](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF-fund-country-sum-donation3.png){kind=link}
![[3]](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF-fund-donation-amount-histogram-currency.PNG){kind=link}
Having a presence "on the ground" in the United Kingdom means that we can influence decision makers who are able to help the Wikimedia cause; from lawmakers and newspaper writers to museum curators and archivists, engaging with opinion formers and forming partnerships with cultural institutions is a great way of promoting and supporting the Wikimedia projects and open content generally.
Half of the money raised will be remitted to the Wikimedia Foundation, for use on items including technology and legal support.
Your contribution will help enable Wikimedia UK to conduct a variety of activities including:
- Helping British people and organisations make better use of the Wikimedia projects by:
- Visiting schools, colleges and universities to teach pupils, students, teachers and academics how to find information in the projects. We need funds to pay for volunteers to travel, hardware to make presentations and to print educational material to hand out.
- ...
- Use British resources to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects by:
- Entering into partnerships with British galleries, libraries, museums and archives to photograph and digitise their exhibits and content. We need funds to purchase digitisation hardware, such as cameras and specialist scanners.
- Hosting a "GLAM-wiki" conference, bringing together Wikimedia enthusiasts and professionals from the "Galleries, Libraries and Museums" sector.
- Developing better technology in Wikimedia, in partnership with the Usability Project. In particular, running usability studies to find out how people in the UK use the Wikimedia projects and how things could be improved for them.
- Lobby the government on copyright reform to make British copyright law more suited to modern ways of sharing information.
- Supporting Wikipedia projects centred on the UK, such as the Celtic Wikipedias project [4]
- Support our successful programme Britain Loves Wikipedia in 2011
- Funding a developers meetup and support their work to improve Wikimedia projects
- Sponsor people from the UK to attend Wikimania
- ...
- Establish the necessary infrastructure to allow us to function more efficiently and reliably by:
- Hiring professionals to ensure we comply with legal and accounting requirements
- Building up a reserve fund to ensure we can continue to operate in spite of future variations in income and expenditure
- Starting a microgrant programme to fund small initiatives for individual members to help Wikimedia projects or to attend free content conferences
- Subsidising members who would not otherwise be able to go to attend the Open Knowledge Conference, which coincides with our AGM
- Conducting media relations
- ...