Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wiki Project Med:Achieving Global Impact

Regional Committee feedback and questions

@Doc James and Ocaasi: Thanks for your proposal from Wiki Project Med for the General Support Fund. The Regional Fund Committee has completed an initial review of the proposal, and has the following feedback, questions, and comments to help support their review:

1. The Regional Committee notes that many of the application documents are housed in an external Google Docs, including the strategic plan, annual plan, team information, metrics, and programmatic information. Because these documents can be changed without a record, and that external documents can become inaccessible over time, the Regional Committee asks that relevant information from the document be transferred into Fluxx so that there is a permanent, static copy of the proposal on Meta-wiki for review, which is consistent with our expectations for other applicants. Specifically, we are requesting that info from these sections should be moved into these questions on Fluxx for the General Support Fund proposal:
   • Strategic Plan Focus Area sections --> Q6
   • Organization section --> Q11
   • Year 2 Programmatic names and summaries --> Q5 Q8
     • Also for Q5, please write that you can refer to your timeline document.
   • For Q7 Q8, please write to refer to your responses in Q6 for challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges aspect of the question.
   • Finally, your metrics and evaluation plan need to be incorporated into Fluxx and cannot be housed in an external document. The evaluation plan should primarily summarize metrics and impact that are relevant across your programs, and can also include metrics relevant only for specific programs at your discretion. If you do not have enough room to include all metrics, that is OK, and we ask that you include the metrics that are most important for your strategic goals next year.
2. The Regional Committee requires a more detailed budget to support more meaningful review of how you plan to use the proposed funding. While your documentation provides some information about what impact/benefits you expect the funding to have and what programs it is related to, it is not clear what specific expenses are associated with these items, or how these proposed budgets were generally determined, particularly around compensation. For example, it not clear from the VideoWiki budget how many developers or other staff this budget is supporting and what compensation developers are generally receiving. Please revise your budget such that it has a comparable level of detail about your expenses as our generic budget template. For staffing, it should be clear how much individual staff and contractors will be paid overall across any operations and programmatic work they will be completing.
3. Question 19.2 notes that If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include their FTEs with the terms separately, but this information is missing from the proposal, which includes 7 contractors. Please revise the proposal to include this information.
4. The Regional Fund Committee is aware that your organization was not able to secure external resourcing to support your initiatives over the last year and that you received minimal feedback from potential funding sources (though, the committee is are aware of other programmatic support you were able to secure, such as using the Wikipedia Store to distribute IIAB devices at a wider scale than before). The committee would like more detail about what specific fundraising efforts were completed by WikiBlueprint or Wiki Med last year. The Committee is specifically interested in what and how many funding programs were applied to, efforts to reach out to donors, as well as any other exploration at general fundraising efforts. What has Wiki Med Foundation learned from its efforts to seek external fundraising opportunities over the last year?
5. The current proposal requests funding for fundraising efforts (Fundraising and Impact Support) and provides the following information about these activities:

   To support dedicated fundraising efforts and impact assessment, allowing us to diversify our revenue streams and measure the effectiveness of our programs. This funding will help ensure long-term sustainability and growth.

The committee has two questions about these proposed efforts:

a) What kinds of fundraising efforts does the Wiki Med Foundation expect to do in this next year? Based on what you learned from last year's efforts to seek external funding support, is there any aspects of this work you intend to do differently?

b) Given that Wiki Med will be continuing to seek fundraising support, and that this budget is increasing from last year (from 15,000 USD to 20,000 USD) it is surprising to see that in the proposal that you do not expect to receive any external funding support over the next year. The committee would like to understand better the rationale for requesting additional funding for this sustainability work when you do not expect to secure any additional external funding.

Please let us know if you have any questions or needs for clarity around the committee's feedback. To support the Regional Fund Committee's review, please respond to committee feedback and complete any needed proposal revisions by Tuesday, November 19th. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Update: Following up on this feedback, I want to acknowledge some issues with the original requests that largely stem from my own misunderstanding of the General Support Fund application form, which created confusion in the feedback and revisions process. I apologize to the applicants and committee for these issues, and appreciate the applicants' patience while we worked through these issues with the feedback today. Specifically, I had misremembered that some questions had open field options, when they did not. There was also a typo referring to the wrong question. As a result, it was not clear to the applicants where or how to move the requested information from external documents into the application itself. Consequently, some original requests have been struck, and others have been revised. After these issues were resolved, the applicants were able to update the proposal accordingly, in particular. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 18:34, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

All good. Let us know if you need any further details. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:32, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Reply to questions

1: Moving to Fluxx

We have saved our entire 2-year retrospective/prospectus, annual plan, strategy, metrics, timeline, and budget as .PDFs and uploaded them to FLUXX. We CANNOT separate these into separate documents, because any time we upload multiple files under different labels FLUXX replaces ALL of them with the last uploaded one. This is a FLUXX problem we cannot yet solve (any help would be welcome!)-- Ocaasi (talk) 18:50, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

2: Budget Breakdown

Most of the budget is going towards paying for contractor time on programmatic efforts as laid out in question 3. A small portion is going to funding a few key contractors and volunteers to attend Wikimania (~10,000 USD) and purchase hardware required to build Internet-in-a-Box (~17,500 USD).

3: Contractors and FTE Terms

We currently have 7 contractors and are planning on hiring another in 2025:

1) Ibrahem Al-Radaei is working with us full time. They are managing development of the healthcare translation dashboard, pulling impact statistics for healthcare across all the languages of WP, and take care of many mass uploads to NC Commons and Commons. Their proposed pay for 2025 is ~15,000 USD.

2) Hassan Amin is working for us as a contractor at 60 USD/hr at about 0.5 of an FTE. He is managing VideoWiki developement and taking on efforts around OWID integration ~40,000 USD.

3) Jake Orlowitz is to be paid a flat rate for managing fundraising of 18,000 USD for 2025.

4) Lucas Rosnau is working a ~0.4 FTE and is paid at $40/hr, 25,000 USD. They are managing outreach with our translation partners aswell as working to recruit further partners.

5) Ryan Schmidt manages the webhosting of MDWiki and NCCommons as well as does core software development. He is paid by the hour at 110 USD for software development and is paid partly based on data usage and hard disk space.

6) Brian Wolff has been working on OWID intergration and the calculator tool. They are funded at 75 USD/hr. It is unclear how much time they will have available for us in 2025.

7) Adam Holt is going to be taking on management of Internet-in-a-Box production in 2025, as well as managing customer concerns and questions. Payment structure has not yet been determined but we are looking at pay per unit work performed. Their budget is included within IIAB hardware and we are estimating 7,500 USD.

8) We are planning to hire another contractor in 2025 to take on management of Internet-in-a-Box software development. We have not conclusively chosen who to hire at this point or what payment structure we will be providing. The budget line for this expense is ~10,000 USD. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:40, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

4: External Fundraising

Fundraising is hard. Name recognition, mission-funder fit, and difficulty of matching specific programs to funder priorities are all challenging. In the medical space, specifically, there is a lot of money spent on mosquito nets on the one hand, to save lives immediately, and molecular genetics and biology on the other hand, to develop future innovations. There is a gap in funder focus on public health information that we have not cracked yet. We know our work matters, but getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from philanthropies with pre-existing focus areas and hordes of applicants is not easy.

Fundraising development does not happen in a single year; it is a multi-year program of proving value, communicating impact, building relationships, and repeatedly seeking funding in different rounds from different funders. Here is who we did contact with a professional compelling Letter of Inquiry/Interest (LOI): Arcadia Fund, Newmark Philanthropies, Simons Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. We received interest from one funder but no follow-up. Other funders did not explicitly reply or said our work was out of scope for their current priorities.

Most important is not what we have or have not earned this year from external sources, but the infrastructure of impact we are building to demonstrate the breadth, depth, scope, relevance, innovation, quality, and significance of our work (See next question). --Ocaasi (talk) 19:01, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

5: Fundraising vs. Impact and Reporting

The "Fundraising" line in our budget is mostly a misnomer, because only 10% of it is focused on reaching out to external funders. 90% of what this line item does is focus on maximizing impact across the nonprofit's three programmatic areas, documenting and updating that impact in detail with both metrics and stories, and reporting out about our progress to communities and funders.

Yes, we do have a funder, the Wikimedia Foundation, and we have gone out of our way to prepare extremely thoughtful, thorough documents that show what we are doing and accomplishing with Movement funds. So let's rename this "Impact and Reporting" for a more honest framing. For one small example, Jake (me) at WikBlueprint led the integration of Internet-In-A-Box (IIAB) with the Wikimedia Foundation Store, the first 'outside' product to ever be sold there. We not only debuted in this innovative forum, but Jake then got news of IIAB placed on hyper-popular tech site BoingBoing!. Within an hour we were sold out, blowing through any demand we have previously seen.

The "Impact and Reporting" role involves being aware of initiatives across the organization and looking for key interventions to drive their impact up beyond expectation. Simultaneously, the reporting component involves quarterly meetings with the Board Chair to detail, record, update, and annotate every single aspect, accomplishment, blocker, and innovation of more than ten initiatives across three areas. It is this so-called Fundraising role which made our mid-year report strong and our 2-year Prospectus of a high professional quality that we can and will use to attract future donations and investment.

The increase from 15k to 20k reflects a proportionate increase in budget for the growing complexity of this function. As WPMEDF grows, Impact and Reporting becomes more constant, compelling, and complex. --Ocaasi (talk) 19:19, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 180,000 USD

@Ocaasi and Doc James: Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 180,000 USD with a grant term starting 1 January 2025 and ending 31 December 2025.

The Regional Committee supported fully funding Wiki Med Foundation on the basis of its general organizational impact towards its goal to support greater accessibility of medical information, with emphasis towards underresourced communities where this access is disproportionately expensive or impractical. This impact is evidenced by Wiki Med Foundation’s expansion of its Internet-in-a-box IIAB distribution work using the Wikipedia Store (and future plans to hire a staff person to manage this growing work), improvements in medical content available on Wikimedia Commons and mdwiki.org, adoption of the MedWiki App, and efficacy of your structured translation work of medical content. The committee supports Wiki Med Foundation to sustain these productive activities that map onto a content area that is globally important, complex, and requires care in its documentation. The committee also appreciates your evaluation plan and metrics, which speak to specific programmatic impacts and their benefits for communities that rely on high quality medical information.

While the committee supported full funding this round, overall regional budget growth will be slowing in future years, significantly limiting the kinds of budgetary growth that will be possible in the General Support Fund for your next proposal. If you are considering more ambitious growth in the future to expand programs or add staff, it is very important to prioritize investigating other revenue sources outside of the General Support Fund to support this growth, even if this work is challenging. We therefore recommend attending to this work to support your organizational sustainability, even if it means that some programs will have less impact in the short term over this next year.

We look forward to Wiki Med Foundation’s work and achievements supporting open knowledge over the next year. On behalf of the Regional Committee, Emjackson42 (talk) 13:29, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your support. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 15:50, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! We will put these funds to maximally good use!! Ocaasi (talk) 17:27, 12 December 2024 (UTC)