1. Document yourselves

You can’t just improvise fund raising. You’re asking people their money: you have to do your research and behave professionally.

Raising funds is like drawing: it’s not a matter of innate talent. Some rare people are naturally good at it, but most people have to learn and practice regularly in order to be really good at it. The good news is that you don’t need to learn a lot to be good enough to see a noticeable change in your income; it may not follow the Pareto principle, but it’s still good news.

There are many books about fundraising out there. Here’s a list of books I own and I read. They’re short and very good to begin with.

• Fund Raising Realities Every Board Member Must Face: A 1-Hour Crash Course on Raising Major Gifts for Nonprofit Organizations, David Lansdowne, Emerson & Church, 2007.
• How to Write Fundraising Materials That Raise More Money: The Art, the Science, the Secrets, Tom Ahern, Emerson & Church, 2007.
• The Zen of Fundraising: 89 Timeless Ideas to Strengthen and Develop Your Donor Relationships, Ken Burnett, Jossey-Bass, 2006.

If you follow their principles, I guarantee you’ll raise more funds. I recommend you read them in this order. Experiment your newly-aquired knowledge during a few months, adapt it to your organization, and keep learning. I’d be happy to provide more links if needed. (Note: if you buy one of these books from these links, I’ll get a small financial reward from Amazon, at no additional cost for you. Don’t worry though, you’ll hardly make me rich!)

2. Apply what you’ve learned

Learning is the first step; it’s mandatory but useless if you don’t apply what you’ve learnt to your specific organization, your mission and your message. These books provide you with a variety of tools and with food for thought, but I suggest to take each principle or piece of advice and see 1. if it applies to you (most do) and 2. how you can apply it.

I’ve found the following modus operandi to be very effective: While you’re reading the books, ideas and thoughts about your own organization will pop up in your head. Write them down as you would brainstorm: write everything even if it looks stupid. But focus on discovering and learning and don’t try to apply it right then. When you’ve read several books, your perspective will have changed and you’ll be more knowledgeable about fundraising already. Read the books again, but this time focus on how you can apply what you’re reading to your own organization and mission. During the first pass, you’re in the learning phase; during the second pass, you’re in the thinking/applying phase, and the books are merely reminders.

3. Understand the importance of raising funds

Don’t try to raise funds because you “should” or because “it’s nice”. Raise funds because you need money. You can never be as convincing when you ask as when you’re passionate about a project you know you can’t accomplish unless you collect the needed amount of money.

You may see fundraising as a difficult activity that doesn’t bring in a lot of money. You may consider other means to collect money (such as selling goodies) because you see them as easier ways to earn money. Considering alternate means is good, but selling T-shirts won’t (and shouldn’t) be your primary source of money. Ever.

You’re nonprofits; that means you should rely on donations and grants. If you don’t learn about fundraising, you may not fully understand its potential. During the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, Liam Wyatt likened the Wikimedia movement to a “Red cross for knowledge”: people will donate to you if you ask the right way. Never underestimate the power of fundraising.

4. Cherish your donors

Thanking your donors one year after they donated is completely unacceptable¹. If you do only one thing, thank your donors and stay in touch. You can’t afford to lose them. When you’ve read a bit about donor relationship management, you’ll understand how foolish this is.

Also, try to walk in your donors shoes (“donor-centric approach”). Why should I give to these Wikimedia folks? Really?

5. Spend your money

The best way to raise funds is to spend your money. Donors don’t give you money so it lingers on your bank account. They give you money so you do things; they want you to accomplish things to make the world better on their behalf. There is no such thing as “waiting for more money before spending it”. If your projects require more money, then raise more money. If you don’t have any projects to spend your money on, you’re in big trouble. Fortunately, my next article will be about just that: how to spend your money.

Notes

The Wikimedia Conference 2009 was held in Berlin, Germany, on April 3rd-5th. It was composed of three tracks:

• a track for chapters, hosted by the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (T-labs)
• a track for the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, hosted by the T-labs
• a track for MediaWiki developers, hosted at the c-base.

About 55 participants attended the chapters tracks, 10 people the board track and 60 people the developers track. Overall, around 130 Wikimedians attended the conference. Social activities where participants from all tracks could meet were proposed.

The preparation was done on meta-wiki (April 2009 Wikimedia Conference, Chapters meeting 2009) and on mediawiki.org (Project:Developer meet-up 2009). A group was created on identica for quick information.

The preparation and organisation started two and a half months before the conference (mid January).The deadlines were roughly met by the organisation team. All tasks requiring action from the participants were delayed of at least a week, sometimes much longer.

Participants

Representatives from all existing Wikimedia chapters officially approved by the WMF Board attended the meeting: Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italia, Hungary, the Netherlands, New York City, Norway, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, Serbia and Russia. Several participants expressed their satisfaction about the fact that all chapters were present at the meeting. This was partly made possible by the financial help provided by sister chapters (see Finances below).

Five participants (from Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia and Serbia) needed to get a visa in order to enter Germany. Wikimedia Deutschland provided them with invitation letters to facilitate the process, but the time needed to get these letters was longer than expected. At least one participant had to change his travel arrangements due to this delay, and as a consequence he had to leave the conference early.

A few chapters needed convincing to attend the meeting.

Finance

Besides Wikimedia Deutschland, 5 other chapters provided financial assistance to their fellow chapters in order to help them attend the conference:

• Wikimedia France: 4000,00 €
• Wikimedia CH: 2000,00 €
• Wikimedia Sverige: 1463,25 €
• Wikimedia Polska: 500,00 €
• Wikimedia Italia: 400,00 €

Travel & transportation

Most of the participants needing subsidying for their travel expenses made special efforts to find low-cost flights. Each participant was given three one-day tickets to use public transportation in Berlin. They were also provided with a map and detailed indications on how to reach all the conference locations. Some participants complained that some itineraries were not ideal.

Venue & accommodation

We had some major issues with the venue. Our contact person at the T-Labs wasn’t very accommodating and the conference suffered from the setup of the rooms (although the organisation team did their best to arrange things to minimize the participants’ inconvenience). However, the venue itself was great and the view was outstanding. Some participants complained that the food wasn’t sophisticated enough (especially sandwiches on 2/3 lunches). They seemed satisfied with dinners & the party. Some of them also complained about the accommodation, but mainly about details (e.g. number of keys).

Programme

All the chapters board members & foundation staff members were requested (several times) to provide input about what they wanted to actually discuss and work upon during the conference (Chapters meeting 2009/Brainstorming). This brainstorming was done in a wiki-way; it was supposed to last two weeks, but was extended to three weeks because of the lack of input from the chapters. The involvment of chapters in this brainstorming was uneven; some chapters did not even participate in it, even after several reminders.

When the brainstorming was over, the output was broken down into specific key topics (Chapters meeting 2009/Topics). Identifying these topics was the first step needed to make a draft schedule (draft version of the schedule). Some feedback and complaints were taken in account and a revised schedule was proposed a few days later.

Although all the topics raised during the brainstorming were added to the schedule, some chapters still complained that their wishes weren’t taken into consideration enough. This may be explained by the very different expectations the chapters had. It was suggested to “group” similar chapters for future meetings using thematic self-discrimination.

Of course there is an edit button. (CC-by-sa by Guillaume Paumier and Elke Wetzig)

Schedule

Some participants complained about the “State of the chapters” session and requested more time to present what their chapter was doing. However, lightning talks were precisely the point of this session: the goal was to present an overviewand topics to be discussed during the rest of the conference. Besides, with more than 20 chapters already, it isn’t possible to devote 15 minutes to each chapter (or The conference should last a week, see below).

Many participants felt that there weren’t enough time for informal meetings; most of them expected a Wikimania-like event (with a lot of socializing), whereas the conference was designed as a professional meeting.

Preparation

Many participants felt that the “State of the chapters” session was too short; however, at the same time, their involvment in preparing it was very low. This session was the only one for which a preparation was requested to the participants (Chapters meeting 2009/Preparation), and many of them didn’t do it on time. That prevented the other participants from having a better look at them, and also prevented the organisation team from preparing posters to be displayed in the conference hall with this information (as a support for informal discussion). Some participants prepared their presentation the night before the conference, or even the morning during the others’ presentation.

Volunteers & documentation

A call for volunteers was made on de.wikipedia.org. There wasn’t enough volunteers to take notes for written documentation during the sessions. However, all the sessions used Metaplan boards for moderation / facilitation, and we had a few volunteers who took pictures of the boards. This way we managed to document the essence of all discussions. The photographers also captured some very interesting feelings and moments of the conference.

Facilitation & moderation

The facilitation was one of the topics that received the most criticism from the participants in the satisfaction survey. However, the participants’ comments were very inconsistent: some complained that the moderation was too strong and that they were hindered by the facilitator; they wished the discussions were less formal and done more freely. On the other hand, some participants felt that the moderation should have been stronger. At the same time, some shy participants confided that they liked the method used by the facilitators because it allowed them to really participate in the discussion. A possible explanation to this variety of comments is that Wikimedians and chapters representatives aren’t used to professional methods of management and moderation, and it will take some time for them to get used to it.

Another complaint was that the facilitators didn’t understand the community enough, and that they didn’t have the “wiki” background. It is true that the facilitators didn’t come from the wikimedia community. However, they had some basic understanding of how Wikipedia worked, and they were briefed during hours by the organisation team to make them understand how the Wikimedia universe works, what the relationships between the different entities are (chapters, foundation, community). Their performance was quite good overall given the complexity of the topics involved. A participant also conjectured that it was very difficult to moderate this conference because the participants formed “a group of very individualistic, fiercely independent people”.

Committees

The committees were introduced in Berlin as an opportunity to hold discussions in small persistent groups on specific topics. There was little preparation from the participants before the conference (Chapters meeting 2009/Committees). They met several times during the meeting and mailing lists were created for each of them, in order to foster collaboration. Wikimedia CH agreed to host these lists.

Satisfaction survey

A short satisfaction survey was handed out to all the participants on Sunday morning. The details are publicly available one meta-wiki. The comments were used to build this postmortem.

General tips for future organizers

• Organise & plan early; almost all chapters work with volunteers and it is very difficult to get things done.
• Send individual e-mails & reminders. It takes a lot of time, but it saves even more time: people feel much more compelled to answer individual e-mails than e-mails sent to mailing lists.
• Be prepared to hear complaints: there are so many chapters with various needs, expectations, various levels of development, etc. that it is impossible to satisfy everybody’s wishes.
• Having high expectations is a good thing, because it urges you to organize a good and successful event. However, be prepared to feel frustrated and disappointed when the outcome isn’t what you expected because the participants didn’t play their part.

The conference should last a week

Even if you tried to satisfy everybody’s wishes, you would need at least a whole week for the conference. Many Wikimedians (including chapters representatives) lack a professional background and can’t work with deadlines & management methods. They want more time for presentations, more time for workgroups, more time for informal discussions, more time for social events, and more time for whatever is on the schedule. That just can’t work.

Survey & processing

The participants could rate all the points from very satisfactory (+2) to satisfactory (+1), unsatisfactory (-1), very unsatisfactory (-2), or no answer (0). 39 participants from the chapters track and 26 participants from the developers track answered the survey.

The overall rating indicates the distribution of the mean of all answers from a participant. This mean (between -2 and 2) was converted to a percentage.

The detailed statistics are based on the mean for each topic from all the participants. They run from the center (-2) to the edge (+2).

Overall rating

Overall rating for the chapters track

Overall rating for the developers track

Programme & sessions

Details of the satisfaction survey: programme & sessions (chapters)

Details of the satisfaction survey: programme & sessions (developers)

Around the conference

Details of the satisfaction survey: around the conference (chapters)

Details of the satisfaction survey: around the conference (developers)

Comments from the participants

See the full report on meta-wiki.

Parallel sessions

Most of the chapters will send two representatives; there will be around 50 participants overall. One of the reasons why it was decided to invite two representatives per chapter is that it would allow for more topics to be discussed. It would be a waste of time and money to remove all parallel sessions now that all these people are flying to Berlin.

WMF staff

Sue Gardner, ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, was worried that it would be ”hard for [her] to justify flying Foundation staff halfway around the world to stage a one-hour workshop that will be attended by [...] a dozen people”. Even in the first schedule, three (out of four) staff members were planned to participate to a whole two-hour track composed of both a presentation/discussion and workgroups. Not counting, of course, all the informal discussions. Besides, as I said above, there will be around 50 participants at the meeting, so even half of them still makes about 25 people, not a dozen :)

In the revised schedule, three (out of three) staff members will still participate to whole 2-hour workshops that are not simultaneous any more. Moreover, the staff members will be part of appropriate committees that will meet several times during the meeting (see What are these “committees”? below). I believe that what they will bring to and learn from the meeting is undeniably worth their attendance, as much for the chapters as for the foundation.

Some chapters expressed concerns about the fact that the WMF staff would come to “teach the chapters how to work”. This is clearly not the goal. This meeting is a chance to learn from each other. The WMF offered to send a few people to help with specific topics. If the aim had been to hold courses, we could have just hired a few German experts in fundraising or outreach. Instead, we invited a few members of the staff of the WMF. Not only are they experts in their field, but they already have the experience of the Wikimedia universe. Last but not least, it is also an opportunity for the chapters to show all the good stuff they’re doing, and for the staff to learn from the chapters.

Where did the morning coffee breaks go?

The first schedule had coffee breaks both in the morning and in the afternoon, whereas the revised schedule only shows coffee breaks in the afternoon. Don’t worry, we’ll have coffee breaks in the morning too :) but they’ll be shorter, and adding them to the table was overly complicated.

Where did the workgroups sharing sessions go?

The workgroups sharing sessions were supposed to be plenary sessions where the various workgroups would present their results. We had to remove them from the schedule in order to free some slots. However, all the workgroups sessions are followed by breaks that allow for informal discussions between participants: lunch, coffee break, dinner, etc. I hope that the workgroups will take advantage of these breaks to share the outcome of their discussions. Besides, all the sessions will be thoroughly documented in order to provide all the participants with a full report of the meeting. Most of the discussions won’t be confidential, so the report will probably even be publicly available on meta.

What are these “committees”?

The committees are an opportunity to hold discussions in small persistent groups on specific topics. Committees will meet several times during the meeting at pre-arranged or other times. They may continue after the meeting if their assignment wasn’t completed. Topics may include: preparing the next fundraiser, discussing trademarks, etc. See also the page on meta-wiki dedicated to Committees.