Task force/Recommendations/Financial sustainability 2

This is a recommendation as submitted by the financial sustainability task force. Please provide input and suggestions on Talk:Task force/Recommendations/Financial sustainability 2

Growth

There is still a lot of room for growth across all the projects funded by WMF. This growth inevitably means the costs will rise and more funds will be required to cover these costs.

Question

What changes or investment would be needed to pursue increased revenue streams?

Strategy

Wikimedia should increase the resources devoted to fund raising from donations in order to generate more income:

1. spending on fund raising thus far is relatively low when compared to other non-profits. Wikimedia's fund raising efforts cost approximately 10% of the revenue generated. Some non-profits spend as much as 33% of their income on generating donations. The Task Force recommends not exceeding a level of 20% and recognizes that Wikimedia is different from most other non-profit organisations because it does not currently have to spend a significant amount of money on advertising or promotion
2. growing capacity is the key to successfully collecting lots of small donations from a large number of people and institutions
3. increased investment in fund raising would allow the fund raising team to explore and test different approaches to achieve their targets. For example:
   1. trialling campaigns based on segmentation of donors (i.e.: targeting corporate donations, wealthy individuals, charitable foundations, governmental funds)
   2. increasing the awareness of WMF’s status as a non-profit organization with a global impact
   3. testing different messages to see if the average amount donated can be increased
4. money should also be allocated for the recruitment and training of fund raising staff at the different Chapters around the world.

N.B: Investment in personnel will need to be reviewed once the results of Movement Roles Task Force are published.