Yesterday, the very first meeting of the newly formed DonateWC team took place. A huge thank you to Luminus, Kim, Topher, and Arno for putting in time and effort!
I’d like to take a moment to discuss the most important decisions that have been made, what the nearby future is going to look like for us, and how you can help out.
We have a bank account!
It took more time and effort than anticipated to get a bank account opened up for the foundation. While the foundation itself has been a legal entity since 2017, it turned out to be quite difficult to get the bank account going. Some thought the foundation’s aim was to traffic people from one country to the other – a ridiculous notion, but one that gave us a lot of trouble nonetheless.
Luckily, Bunq saw things differently and set us up with a shiny new bank account within about 30 minutes of signing up.
Application stop for 2018
We decided to pause applications for 2018. No bank account meant that collecting donations has been nigh on impossible for the past 6 months, even with a working PayPal account. That means the foundation has virtually no funds right now to offer any kind of sponsorship.
We’ve decided to instead spend the next 6 months focussing on talking to potential corporate sponsors and collecting donations for our 2019 goal of €10.000,-.
If you would like to know more about becoming a corporate sponsor, we invite you to get in touch for more information.
Refining sponsorship prerequisites
Determining who gets a sponsorship is hard. We can’t apply the same ‘rules’ to each case that comes through the door, so the recipient selection process is undergoing some much-needed scrutiny. Things we have so far decided on are:
Sponsorships will be for local WordCamps
This means that until we have a stable financial situation, the foundation does not facilitate a round-the-world trip. Instead, we’re choosing to help more people to get involved in their local communities. We feel that this is the best use of community funds and will help further the WordPress community most.
Limiting the number of available sponsorships
The foundation functions as a company; we need to take a long, hard look at what we want to achieve, and what money allows us to achieve. Again, this depends very much on the assistance of donators. That’s why we’ve determined that having a specific goal for the number of sponsorships we’re handing out is required; it’ll help us to 1) get the funding we need, and 2) keep a handle on what we can do.
How you can help out
While we’re now a team of 5, more help is still needed. Particularly as we are looking to focus on donator outreach, we can use a few more hands to reach our 2019 goal.
Do you enjoy writing, social media, or generally talking to other people – and are you not shy about asking folks to pitch in on this wonderful cause? We have a couple of volunteer roles open and are looking for your help!
If you are a WordCamp organizer: we would love it if you could let your audience know that we exist. This is a global effort, looking to improve and diversify your visitors as well as those going to other WordCamps. Send out a tweet, email, or Facebook post and we’ll be super grateful 🙂 thanks in advance!
