Fundraising

We need to seriously start thinking about doing a fundraiser for Wiki Spot to keep our wikis moving to a better tomorrow.

The day we get our 501(c)3 status confirmed. Get everything ready before then.

Wiki Spot is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Therefore, if you live in the US you can deduct donations you make from your taxes! So — you may end up paying less in taxes by giving!

Go to our Donate page, and use our online donation system. Its fast, and if you want you'll be listed on the Donation page as a contributer. Large donations: contact us directly, since Paypal takes a small portion of the transaction.

You can help out by simply displaying the donate to Wiki Spot banner on your website during Wiki Week. If you can, consider holding a fundraiser for both Wiki Spot and your local wiki. Many communities need a little bit of money for promotion, but please consider giving a portion of the proceeds to Wiki Spot to keep our servers running.

If your community is an established nonprofit, consider granting a small portion of your budget to Wiki Spot to help us keep the system running for 24/7 access to your membership. Right now, we're operating on a < $5,000 a year budget, so any contributions that would allow us to buy more hardware or pay for staff time are greatly appreciated. You'll likely need to explain to users the difference between donating to Wiki Spot and donating to your organization, should you leave the donation banner on.

For right now, our greatest needs are new hardware, particularly in disk storage. Keeping every revision takes a significant amount of storage, and we also make backups to ensure that your data is safe. We also need to keep the bits flowing, for bandwidth is life. Some of this funding will be available to help promote your local community — ask us if you have an idea! If you want to know more, see our Budget.

Right now, we're funded exclusively by people like you donating money to keep us afloat. Sometimes, we even have to rely on the grace our colocation provider to put the costs on our tab to keep us operating from month to month. Despite all of this, we've always survived from the donations of people in the public, giving money to the Davis Wiki years before we officially became a nonprofit organization.

• Should we organize some sort of benefit concert — presumably in Davis? Who wants to help out?

• How do we get other communities involved in the fundraising effort? We can safely assume that we'll have some support from the standard array (davis, chico, and santacruz), but we may want to help them plan something.

• Write a message explaining the difference between fundraising for your local wiki, and fundraising for Wiki Spot. Do this in such a way that communities want to get involved.

• JabberWokky is working on grant proposals. Do we need any help here?

• Wiki Week for fundraising. How about some week in early April?

• We have the "Wiki Spot is read only" message; can that be adapted to display "Donate to Wiki Spot"¹
  

• banner / wiki settings — allow them to customize message and turn off.

• We should have a section describing specific things and specific projects we want to work on and how donations can help drive that. Project focused fundraising is very effective.

• Emails to wiki admins about fundraiser

More info: Fundraising draft, Donate, Budget, board