Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/2019 Community Conversations/Revenue Streams

Current situation

Current weakness of International fund raising

I think fund raising could be organised in a better way

• Lack of non-US tax exempt (e.g. in Belgium the government would pay 45% of the gift)

• Lack of easy IBAN/BIC free payments within EU union due to not providing EU bank account tranfer possibility

• No specific directions for what purpose the gift is done (Wikipedia is flag ship but 15 other applications/projects are not known)

Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) (talk) 18:43, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

• Lack of non-US tax exempt condition hinders fund raising. It's also the case in Spain.
  Local chapters depend on local legislation in order to achieve such status. In the Spanish case, "Utilidad Pública", which makes donations to local NGOs (partially) tax deductible, is very difficult to obtain. Help from the center would be a difinite help (for instance, nobody would discuss Utilidad Pública to Cruz Roja Española, because the Red Cross is behind them and very well known, the same can be said about Amnesty International, MSF, etc).
  B25es (talk) 17:54, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

• what "facing external challenges to its current revenue model" are you talking about? has there been any limit to fundraising, other than internal decisions to shut down banners when goals are met? Slowking4 (talk) 22:22, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Why this scope

• "The necessary increase in revenue requires an expansion and diversification of revenue streams" citation needed; diversification is good in and of itself, but you are speculating about resource needs, and level of effort to raise those resources. Slowking4 (talk) 22:26, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Please approve crowdfunding wishlist project

Dear Revenue Streams working group, please approve Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Assist Wikimedians with crowdfunding for Foundation support. Thanks in advance. Best regards, James Salsman (talk) 03:37, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Investments

Does Endowment and Foundation investment policy fall within the purview of this group? (Does it fall within both Resource Allocation and Revenue Streams?) If so, please consider benchmarking investment performance against institutional endowment-grade mutual funds and studies of endowment performance.[1] Please see also [2]. Thank you for your kind consideration of this request. James Salsman (talk) 05:07, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Return on investment from fundraising ads

Please perform independent measurement of the cost per dollar of https://ads.nextdoor.com, https://ads.reddit.com, https://ads.google.com, https://ads.twitter.com, and https://ads.linkedin.com, and compare those to on-wiki ads, email, and in-person events. I predict all will cost less than Facebook which was measured in the past couple years. Please measure on a cost-of-donations basis. James Salsman (talk) 06:39, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Conciseness-frequency fundraising ads tradeoff?

Please try A/B testing against a small, one-line banner such as Google uses for charitable fundraising and consider showing more of those instead of fewer large banners to achieve the same total goal, so as not to break section links that move so far when large banners scroll the viewport position when they are written in to the top after the vertical layout has been rendered in the browser (i.e., linking to a section can scroll it down considerably with the new large banners, obscuring the intended link target.) Please note that this would also address an issue with the banner story in the developing world and poor countries. James Salsman (talk) 06:39, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Financial transparency and Non-WMF revenue sources and revenue allocation

Please see the discussion on the Working Group's talk page. James Salsman (talk) 16:11, 25 April 2019 (UTC)

Feedback and Input from Wikimedia Österreich

This is feedback from WMAT's expert group for international affairs, the input was also discussed with our board and community.

• The movement has only learned in recent years to embrace the international aspects that help us all improve our work and our understanding of who we are as an international movement. This should also be reflected in the way we approach a long-term strategy for collecting and distributing money. Every affiliate is knowledgeable in their local context, but does not necessarily have the expertise to use this to their advantage. Other affiliates have built expertise in certain areas over the last 10+ years and are able to support and advise other affiliates in those areas. This is what we need to build on in order to advance our mission until 2030. Using the expertise we already have as building blocks for a long-term strategy will help us reach further than in any other case.
• From our experience there is a need on the side of some donors to connect on an local / regional level: They rather donate to an Austrian organisation and want to learn more about what is done with the money in their specific country. Some of them might be interested to become members of their local affiliate or contribute in other ways. Hence, we believe that even if not every affiliate / local group raises funds, we need to work together more closely to work on our donor relations. Currently the WMF does not share any information about local affiliates, their work and events with donors, so we are missing out on important opportunities for sustainable donor relations.
• There are clear red lines in terms of revenue streams that would endanger the foundations of our projects: Advertisement on Wikipedia and other projects should be a non-starter (and it would be helpful if the revenue streams working group could set out some non-goals as soon as possible) and considering the setting up of a trust, this will alleviate any worries concerning funding the servers and operations. Paywalls are a similar non-starter for an open knowledge project and reducing openness in order to acquire grants or donations from certain organisations is similarly out of the question for us. In general, there should be a guide for what is acceptable as a grant and what isn’t, because even receiving an unconditional grant might create a bias towards the donor.

--Wikimedia Österreich (talk) 15:04, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

Existing volunteers, donors, and previous attendees at Wikimedia events

What has been done to research how to get the maximum support from current and former volunteers, donors, and attendees at Wikimedia events?

Obviously, you don't want to be too heavy handed, because you can drive people away.

However, you do want to people to feel welcome, etc.

I'd like to mention a couple of issues in this regard: (1) The difficulty of even learning about and staying current on the planning for Wikimania 2019, and (2) more general outreach to invite more participants and donors to the extent that they might be likely to respond positively.

Difficulties keeping current of plans for Wikimania 2019

I attended Wikimania 2017 and 2018, and I've had Wikimania 2019 in my calendar since the end of Wikimania 2018. The first match when I have searched for "Wikimania 2019" has been Wikimania 2019, which has mostly out of date since 2018-08-01. In 2019-02-03 I found the current site after some considerable effort and added a link from Wikimania 2019 to the current site. I think that Wikimania 2019 should have been maintained as the current page rather than creating a completely new page -- and failing to make an effort to make it easy for people to find the the current site from Wikimania 2019.

Everyone is busy, and I don't believe this was done with the intention of making it hard for people to stay current with the planning, though one could wonder if that was intentional by people who felt that the conference might attract people they don't really want. So they made it harder to find so only those sufficiently committed to it would actually come. I don't think that's what happened, but some might get that impression.

In particular, I think there should be an effort to keep people who have attended previous Wikimania conferences informed about the current plans -- especially those who paid their own airfares from substantial distances to attend.

Instead, I've had to check every month or two to monitor the progress of the plans. I got busy in April and May and learned only yesterday, 2019-06-01, that I had almost missed the deadline to apply to organize a session. My application to speak in 2017 was rejected. I gave a lightning talk in 2018. I have more ideas about how the Wikimedia Foundation might be able to get major philanthropies to fund further development of something "WikiSocial" and connect with social movement groups to counter the Balkanization and exploitation of the international body politic attributed to commercial media, as I discuss in the next section. DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:43, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Inviting major philanthropies to fund WikiSocial and social movement groups to drive increased usage

Countering the Balkanization of the Body Politic

At Wikimania 2019 I gave a lightning talk on "Countering the Balkanization of the Body Politic".

I believe the Wikimedia Foundation could play a major role in promoting peace and international security and in reversing the trend toward increasing xenophobic violence by committing to develop a noncommercial social media platform if

• major philanthropic organizations would fund the effort and
• social activist groups would help build an audience for it.

The Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network have called for proposals to deal with this problem. I think they, and probably others, would eagerly fund a sensible proposal supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.

I also think we could get a number of social activist groups to eagerly help test, develop and promote deployment, encouraging people to migrate away from for-profit social media. I attended annual lobbying and planning sessions of Peace Action in March 2019 and the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability in May 2019 in Washington, DC. I can't speak for those organizations, but I believe we could get them and many others to eagerly embrace a noncommercial social media platform if it could be designed to meet their needs while also working to reduce rather than amplify the natural human tendency to seek information sources that reinforce our preconceptions, which mainstream media organizations everywhere have used since the beginning of civilization to Balkanize and exploit the international body politic to maximize the social status of the people who control media funding and governance.

To maximize our chances of success with this effort, I think we should try to recruit help from someone like Daniel Kahneman in designing a research program to work with software developers to maximize the likely success of whatever we deploy; I mention Kahnemn, because he is the only research psychologist to have won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and is arguably the leading expert in how people think and make decisions.

Comments? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:43, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Another issue: If we can get something going in this area, it might help us resist some of the changes in law that would make it easier for elites to censor the internet. DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:05, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

References

Wikimedia Deutschland staff perspectives

Over the last weeks WMDE's Strategy Liaisons, Moritz Rahm and Cornelius Kibelka, have conducted interviews with 13 experts among our staff on the themes of the working groups. Mostly, the qualitative interviews were done with groups of 2 or 3 people, the texts provided are summaries of the statements.

We conducted two different interviews on Revenue Streams.

Why assuming that the small donation model doesn’t work in the future?

The basic assumption of the scoping document seems to be that our current revenue model of large amounts of small donations doesn’t work much longer for our ambitious goals – this is surprising and not really explained. Actually, this revenue model has huge potential, and we haven’t used much of it. We can reach our goals using this model, but of course, nevertheless, from a risk management perspective, it's good to diversify our revenues.

Beyond this basic assumption, the scoping part is actually quite scarce, and it’s hard to estimate what the group is actually thinking or aiming for. Further, there seems to be the assumption that we need “much more” money, but it is not explained for what. And this is actually one of the challenges of fundraising in general – if you ask for money, explain for what you’ll spend it.

The small donations model has a lot of potential that we haven’t fully tapped, actually.

In the Wikimedia movement, only two Wikimedia organizations – Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland – do actual local fundraising. We cover the German market, the WMF covers the US and other markets – but there is so much more potential. Other NGOs with a similar chapter structure (like Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace, etc.) make a lot of money doing local fundraising. Why shouldn’t we do this as well? At the moment, we have only a semi-professional structure for the whole movement. If we were doing this professionally, we could get out so much more.

However, beyond this small donations model, Wikimedia Deutschland has developed two other revenue pillars to mitigate the risk on relying only on one model: membership fees and third party funding/partnerships. Actually, we already have more revenues through our membership fees than through small donations. That is an example of local fundraising uses local giving cultures since the membership funding model is not exercisable by an international player.

We should engage more on major donations. They’re risky (to a certain extent), but they might support our mission even more than ‘just Wikipedia’

We should take more major donations – of course there is a risk, especially a political one (like to be called a Google funded player during the EU Copyright Reform debate). But that alone is not a reason not to take major donations. The challenge is different: The more you want (or get), the more you need to explain how you will spend the money. We have received so much criticism over the last few years, and we weren’t good in explaining how (and why) we spent so much money. We need to become better at explaining what we do, to move away from the “Wikipedia maintaining fundraising” towards “funding for our mission”. If we manage to explain our mission (better), we will be ready to take major donations. For major donors we need to go beyond Wikipedia, probably our strategic direction could be quite helpful with that. At the same time, for small donors and our members, “I like Wikipedia” by itself seems to work quite well.

Beyond that, at Wikimedia Deutschland we had analyzed in 2018 what options do we have to increase and diversify our revenues and create long-term financial stability. Some of these options should be considered also for the movement in general, as there are so many different options, like rounding-up payments at supermarkets, or salary donations, where larger companies donate a tiny amount cents per salary. There are many special options in local context, see also Wikimedia Deutschland’s paper on that from 2012.

More decentralized fundraising is the way to go. Of course, it brings more overhead, that’s natural.

As mentioned above, decentralized fundraising is the way to go, as we haven’t used the full potential to raise funds for the mission of free knowledge. This creates, to a certain extent, always overhead. But this is something totally natural – if you want more money, you need more people to raise and manage that. Again, take one of the bigger NGOs: They have more employees in their fundraising teams, but also much higher revenues. Why shouldn’t we follow these examples?

Banner fundraising works best with the community’s approval

Regarding the question whether we should do more local, decentral fundraising, there seems to be a discrepancy between the communities and the affiliates. If you have a lot of resistance towards creating more overhead for managing more revenues, you should ask if there are conflicting goals with the Movement Strategy. The Strategic Direction clearly aims for a movement that is more powerful, is stronger, has more partners, platforms and services – where should this come from? How should that be funded?

Of course, the resistance towards fundraising in general, but also on a local level, depends on the local communities. Of course, both, WMF and WMDE could do fundraising ignoring the communities’ feedback. However, for us, as Wikimedia Deutschland, it was really meaningful and important to engage with ‘our’ community, understand their interests and wishes, and to gain their approval. Good, sustainable, long-term fundraising works best with the support of the community.

Red lines are ‘Dark UX’, ads, and soft privacy/data protection rules. Keep the spirit of being the ‘good one’

One scoping question also asks for red lines: Something that is called ‘Dark UX’ (or ‘Dark pattern’) is not something Wikimedia organizations should do. Also, ads in general are far away from the movement’s values. On the other hand, strong privacy rules, no censorship, etc. are values to be followed when raising funds and managing them. Our unique selling point is: We’re the good ones, we don’t save your data, we don’t create profiles for customized marketing. We’re a special part of the web. We could even promote this stronger how important we are for the internet as a whole. Again, we need to promote our mission better, beyond Wikipedia.

Talking about our mission and using mainly Wikipedia as the reason to donate, a rebranding as proposed, inherits some risks that could contradict a better contextualization of our other projects. It would become even more difficult to differ between our project and our mission. Especially since emphasizing the latter for a better revenue model is key for its success .

We don’t have (yet) good elevator pitches for our projects towards donors. If you can explain easily what we have achieved in, let’s say, our open educational resources project, and why it’s important that we do that, we’re progressing. For most, Wikipedia is the easiest reason to donate, because they have the most benefit from it (self-interest). You need to show how valuable all our other projects are; at the end also for the donors themselves.

Feedback from donors and readers?

It seems that there is no really consultation or feedback loop with donors and readers. If the movement decides on something without consulting them, it could create conflicts.

What’s missing: A mapping of the current state, and based on that, a list of potentials

The scoping document looks good, in general, but actually a mapping of the current state is missing. Beyond banner fundraising, (just!) WMDE has additional income via members, major gifts, institutional partnerships, and bequests. A lot of these revenue streams are done only in a semi-professional way by WMF and WMDE. Based on such mapping the potentials should be explored, like B2B, B2C, etc. WMDE has done something similar for its own purposes.

Tech and legal for fundraising should be centralized, communication/messaging highly decentralized

In terms of the centralization of banner fundraising and complete decentralization doesn’t make much sense: Banner fundraising needs huge investments in security, legal, and general overhead. It makes more sense to keep these functions centralized, maybe on a continental level, but invest much more in decentralized communication staff that develops local messages. Imagine that WMDE manages the tech and legal part of banner fundraising for Europe, but local chapters employ staff members that develop campaigns and messaging.

On the other hand, broader fundraising efforts (major gifts, bequests, etc.) should be much more decentralized than at the moment. These work locally much better.

All money is movement money – but let’s move the money more flexibly around and use it where it’s needed

On the scoping questions it’s surprising that the first one asks directly for a perspective of “hundred years”, that’s basically impossible. The question should be: How can we manage most diverse revenue streams while always being able to adapt and be flexible? Especially as the scoping document has the strong assumption that the small donation model doesn’t work anymore, which is understandable to a certain extent, other major risks should be included as well.

All the money that comes into the movement should be considered movement money. Of course, there are certain revenues that are legally bound to an organization (like membership fees), but that’s something to talk about.

The other strong assumption of the scoping document is that we’ll need constantly higher revenues. This is something to be questioned. If there’s plenty of money, creativity diminishes, organizations get lazy. A lot of money is not a guarantee to achieve things. Furthermore, underspending is not as dramatic as people in the Wikimedia movement tend to call it. It would be great if we could move money in a more flexible way between different parts of the movement, and use it where it’s needed.

Red lines: Advertisement and gifts by immoral partners

The red lines question seems to be easier to respond: Advertisement in Wikipedia (the Wikimedia projects) is a taboo. Beyond that, accepting donations that come from the arms industry or institutions far from our core values and our missions is a red line as well. In general, partnerships should be questioned on a regular and transparent basis.

If you have any questions, please let us know. Best regards, --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 14:12, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

@Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE): Thank you for this message. Just need to clarify this sentence In the Wikimedia movement, only two Wikimedia organizations – Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland – do actual local fundraising. You are probably talking about doing fundraising with the banner because a lot of affiliates are fundraising.

I think that we should also study the use of the donors database to increase the membership, see my post here. Pyb (talk) 19:34, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, the interviewee meant "banner fundraising". --Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE) (talk) 13:54, 4 September 2019 (UTC)