International Fundraisers

This may have been raised before, sorry if I'm re-hashing old discussions.

I was wondering if anyone had been thinking about fundraising internationally as part of the Financial sustainability issues. Clearly, the WMF has been able to increase its fundraising capacity and professionalism in the last couple of years and this has reaped good rewards. We are not yet at the stage either in the USA or anywhere else in the world of having fully tapped-out the market in terms of fundraising yet, there is little-to-no fundraising efforts invested specificially in countries that aren't the USA. This is what the chapters are for, and it is fair/correct that the WMF is not trying to step on their toes.

We can see from this 2008 fundraising statistics graph that there are 10 non-USA nations that giving almost $100k or more (counting from switzerland-CH up). But, no WMF resources are being used to assist those countries to grow that amount - all of that money is coming in "naturally". There is huge underperformance in fundraising in these countries simply because we've never actually had the capacity to do anything in them other than put up the sitenotice.

Can I suggest then, that entirely on a basis of financial return (no equity or moral argument), that the WMF invest in growing the fundraising capacity of the 5 or 10 biggest donor nations? Where there is a chapter in that nation, then the WMF might see fit to give a grant to pay for the 1st year's salary for a fundraising manager for the chapter. Where there is no chapter, the WMF might approach it in another way. At this point in our community's growth, a "rising tide lifts all boats". Of course, there would need to be discussions about how the money would be re-distributed after it is collected (as is normal in WMF-Chapter relations) but my point is that, in terms of financial sustainability, the fundraising potential of non-USA nations is absolutely huge. Now that the WMF has a stable and professionalised fundraising team I believe that it is a strategic-level-thing to invest time/effort/money in improving the fundraising capacity in other nations, in association with the chapters as much as possible.

This has been mentioned many times by different team members, increasing chapter participation by engaging their community directly. Fundraising targets could be set for individual chapters from some of the larger donating countries. It would require a great deal of co-ordination from what I understand, perhaps a chapter or a team solely in charge of EU fundraising activities who could in turn co-ordinate with individual European chapters and follow targets.