Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Proposed changes to General Support Fund in 2023-24

Proposed changes to General Support Fund process in 2023-24

Based on the learnings and Wikimedia Foundation Funds strategy, we are proposing new changes to the General Support Fund (Wikimedia Community Fund) program. Please review this page and provide your feedback on the discussion page from April 30 to May 16, 2023.

Quick summary

Overall goals: Commitment to shared learning and partnership, lightweight process

Learning and partnership

Creating shared categorization of the Movement led efforts to support learning from collected data. It will be supported with more shared learning sessions.
Expanding multi-year funding eligibility for all General Support Fund applicants to support long term costs (i.e. staffing and rent) without the requirement of a multi-year strategic plan.
Increasing support beyond funding that is coordinated across relevant teams at the Wikimedia Foundation and investigating external organizations with expertise in grantee-partner prioritized areas.

Lightweight process

Creating streamlined grant renewal process for current General Support Fund grantee partners.
Removing written Midpoint Learning Report as a reporting requirement.
Revising the General Support Fund application, reporting forms, and grant agreement to ensure we have a lighter process.

Listening to community: Why are we making changes

In November 2022, the Community Resources team published a diff post that explained what we had learned after one year of launching the Wikimedia Foundation Funds strategy. It highlighted areas we needed to focus on for the coming year.

Going Forward

The discussions of movement governance and resource allocation are important and ongoing. In the interim and together as a movement, we have been able to advance our goals, especially around equity of funding distribution and the ability to connect people to learn in safe spaces. There is still much to reflect on and a need for innovation that can be fed into the larger governance discussion. Some reflections to take us into the future are:

Changing the relationship dynamic towards partnership takes intention, trust and time. Trust-based philanthropy models are new to the movement. How can we continue to connect and learn from each other while building trust and improving how we reach our goals?
The funding process remains heavy; what is the essential information needed to understand the work? A lightweight renewal process will be collaboratively built with the community over the next year.
Multi-year funding has given grantee partners a sense of stability, especially for their personnel. For organizations that want to develop and grow, what other support can be provided beyond funding?

After speaking with grantee-partners, Regional Fund Committees and members of the Foundation we are proposing to make the following high-level changes to the General Support Fund program beginning in July 2023.

Co-creation: Process and timeline

Proposed process and timeline for the changes to the General Support Fund process in 2023–2024

In November 2022, we announced our continued commitment to evaluate, iterate and adapt to the Wikimedia Foundation Funds process – reviewing Wikimedia Community Fund (General Support Fund, Rapid Grants and Conference & Events), Wikimedia Alliances Fund, Wikimedia Research Fund and Movement Strategy Implementation Grants. We have begun with a focus on the General Support Fund which represents 77% of all funds distributed in FY 2022 across 82 grants.

We solicited feedback from Regional Fund Committees and held 5 live sessions with them. We hosted 3 open sessions with General Support Fund grantee-partners which had a total of 64 participants in 6 languages. We kept the feedback form open to all grantee-partners to continue to provide asynchronous feedback. We did an internal review of processes within the Foundation with Program Officers and Grants Administrators as well as the other supporting teams in the legal, accounting, community programs, community development, partnerships and product/tech and movement communications.

The high-level changes proposed are open for comment from April 30 to May 16, 2023. Based on feedback, we will iterate and adapt the proposal to finalize this process. The month of June will be spent to support the backend process of Fluxx and update the application form and guides. We will announce the final changes, applications and guides at the beginning of July. We will then follow up with a series of orientation sessions to help with the implementation of the changes and provide months of time to prepare before the first round of funding launches.

Proposed changes to the General Support Fund program

Commitment to shared learning and partnership

Categorization of Movement work for learning and understanding

Based on the learning report, many grantee-partners are doing similar work across the globe. Categorizing grantee-partner programmatic work across the movement based on the community descriptions found in the General Support Fund applications will ease the process and create better-shared understanding for relevant stakeholders, such as Regional Funding Committees, Movement affiliates, and Wikimedia Foundation staff. Aligning the categories with Foundation teams dedicated to relevant programmatic work also facilitates learning and support beyond funding.

With the clear categorization of movement work, we can begin to speak the same language on the overarching goals and develop useful metrics to inform programmatic work. Grantee partners, Regional Fund Committees, and the Foundation have requested support to understand, measure and learn from our collective work. By setting a baseline, and monitoring over time with shared learning sessions, we can create a true culture of learning and adapting. As the Foundation’s product and tech teams prioritize Signals & Data services for all movement stakeholders, having shared categories of work will enable the ability to share data which can then be translated into meaningful insights.

We hope this will ease the process for most applicants. We also will give all applicants the option to not use the categories and have unlimited space to add any other descriptions of their programmatic work and metrics. Priority would be to categorize the most common programmatic work as outlined in the learning report: Education, Culture & Heritage, Gender, Advocacy, Partnership, Community Support and Organizational Development.

Categorization example (draft): Education
70% of grantees reported they do programmatic work in education in FY 2022-23.
Overarching goals (1 or all 3 depending on the grantee-partner):

Development of pedagogical tools that promote digital literacy

Increase contributions to open-knowledge content

Shift attitudes towards Wikipedia (is not brand/awareness)

Common Programming we see:

Student editing programs and activities:
Wiki clubs and camps

Edit-a-thons

Classroom editing assignments

Training/workshops for students
Teacher training/editing

In-service

Workshop

Edit-a-thon

Advocacy-Shifting Perception
Creating teaching resources and OERs

Research about the impact of Wikimedia on education

Providing technical support

Training/workshops for education system leadership

Technical tools/documentation
Creating new resources for education stakeholders to contribute to Wikimedia projects

Audio/visual instructions

Project documentation

Technical tools/dashboards

Support for learning with data

Based on the learning reports the goal is to support grantee-partners to develop metrics and ways of using the data they capture to understand their stated goals and inform their work. The metrics section of the grant application will be redone to allow for greater ease and clarity of the specific metric that is being asked for so it can be easily aggregated. With this information, we could understand a possible baseline for metrics like participation in edit-a-thons in different regions. We commit to continually approve accessible and relevant information to our grantee-partners as highlighted in the product/tech priorities of Signals and Data Services.

Support beyond funding

As highlighted in the Wikimedia Foundations Annual Plan we will continue to invest in skills and leadership development of the movement.

We recognize that grantee-partners that receive General Support Funds range greatly in maturity and size. In the learning reports, we suggested three broad categories of grantee partners. We would like to provide tailored contextualized support beyond funding for each grantee-partner, facilitating a process for them to set milestones that are important to their goals which vary with each organization.

An example of milestones within an important category we see is the following:

Category: Governance – A grantee partner has open and transparent governance practices that are accepted in the movement.
Possible milestones:

Submitted affiliate / organizational annual reports that are shared and accessible to the movement. Posted on Meta.

Have an updated Affiliate Meta Page with the board, core team or other team and members. Has transparent governance / general assembly meetings with minutes available.

Systemized learning sessions after mid-year and final learning conversations: Set a normal pace to have regional learning sessions sharing experiences after each mid-year learning program officer conversation with grantee-partners.
Coordinated support across with relevant foundation teams and external partners: Develop a holistic approach to support beyond the funding for affiliate grantee partners across relevant Foundation teams (Community Programs, Partnerships, Community Development, Movement Communications and Product/Tech). Investigate external organisations that have the expertise and contextual knowledge to support affiliates in a few priority areas.

Expanding Multi-year funding

Minimum of three years of multi-year funding will become available to all General Support Fund applicants.

Applicants with Strategic Plans will follow the current multi-year funding process. Full funding for operational and programmatic work will continue as developed. The disbursement of funding each year is based on the receipt of an annual budget and annual plan. Reports are required at the end of each year as well as learning conversations with program officers.

Applicants without strategic plans will submit an application for multi-year funding for three years. Multi-year funding would be approved for long-term fixed costs i.e. staffing, rent, utilities etc and the first year of programmatic work. As they don’t have a strategic plan and the work may have more changes, they will follow a lightweight renewal process for the following two years for programmatic or staffing changes. The renewal process will be reviewed by Regional Program Officers and where needed, the Regional Fund Committee. Amendments will be made based on those decisions to the grant agreement.

Orientation and support for implementing changes

The Regional Fund Committee and grantee partners will be supported through sessions and training on the new changes and forms to focus on learning and partnership mindset.

Lightweight process

Main application

Based on the categorization work described above, we will streamline the application to have more dropdown and multiple-choice questions.
Word count limits will be removed.
Once the new application is completed – the information will be used to pre-populate renewal applications.
All questions and guides will be reviewed to ensure clear and concise language suited for translation.

Renewal application

Renewal application will focus on five main areas of questions that were highlighted in the feedback from both grantee-partners and Regional Fund Committee members:

Review of already pre-populated answers from initial application
Questions on what has been achieved and learned
Questions on any relevant changes
1. To programming
2. To staffing
3. To operating environment
Updated metrics
Updated budget

Reporting requirements

Written midterm or midpoint reports at 6 months will no longer be required.
Over the last year, the Program Officer conversation has been highlighted as an important moment of shared learning. We will continue these learning conversations at the midterm and final timeline of the grant. Regional Fund Committee members will have the option to review.
All grantee partners will continue to have the end of year report published on Meta.
Participating in learning sessions will be greatly encouraged
Final learning report will be adjusted to the application form changes.

Simplified grant agreement

We have worked with the legal department and grants administration to create a simplified grant agreement for non-multi-year grants to groups and nonprofits. We will make sure that as part of the onboarding process, every Program Officer reviews the grant application with grantee-partners.

Aligning regions with the Wikimedia Foundation

The Community Resources will shift from its current seven regions to align with the rest of the Foundation as outlined in the APP. The most notable changes are:

The Middle East and Africa region will change to the Middle East & North Africa region and the Sub-Saharan Africa region. Both regions will continue to be supported by one Regional Fund Committee.
The United States and Canada region will be renamed to the North America funding region with the same Program Officer and Regional Funds Committee supporting. Mexico will continue to be supported in the Latin America & Caribbean region.

Updated Meta pages

We are currently in the process of reviewing and updating the meta page and guides. Our goal is to make the information more accessible for both newcomers and existing grantee partners. Thank you to those who have supported the process with interviews and feedback. We plan to launch the new pages in July 2023. We will continue to offer language and translation support.

Appreciation

We want to thank each of you for being on this journey with us. In 2020, the Movement Strategy recommendation to “Ensure equity in decision making” called for more participatory resource allocation, flexible funding systems, and the empowerment of local communities. We led a collaborative process to create a new, interim strategy to improve grantmaking toward these aspirations that could later feed into governance questions and Movement Strategy implementation. We committed to evaluate, iterate and adapt. This is what we are doing with your support.

Thank you to all the volunteers who sit on the Regional Fund Committees, the grantee-partners who have been on this journey with us – providing invaluable feedback and patience, the Program Officers who have led the engagement with communities in their regions around the globe and the teams across the Wikimedia Foundation who support movement work.