Talk:2013 Activity Plan

General discussion

I just want to thank Jon for putting this together. It's great to get all the (hopefully) uncontroversial stuff down at the beginning so we can make the discussion as productive as possible.

A lot of the budget items so far are continuations of 2012 budget items (which is the obvious place to start), so it would be useful to have some projections of spending against budget for those items in 2012. Do such projections exist? (I see Jon has already adjusted some of the items to reflect lessons learned this year, but is that just based on his personal knowledge of what has been spent or is it written down somewhere?) --Tango (talk) 14:49, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

All based on what is deliverable (well mostly wouldn;t want to kill too many babies) Jon Davies WMUK (talk) 19:50, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

That doesn't answer the question. --Tango (talk) 20:08, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

3. Staff

Separate section?

I don't think staff should be a separate section. I would pay for the fundraiser out of the fundraising budget, the education person out of the education budget, etc.. The staff costs of an activity are no different to any other costs, they are still money being spent to achieve something, so why should they be budgeted differently? Some staff may need to be split between multiple budgets, with an estimate of how much of their time they will spend on each. The office rent can also be shared across the projects in proportion to staff time - the cost of the bit of office that someone is sitting in while they work on a particular project is as much a cost of that project as anything else is.

One of the things a non-profit is judged on is how much of its money goes on its programmes. Therefore, we should make sure that all programme spending is correctly allocated to programmes, otherwise we just make ourselves look bad. --Tango (talk) 14:37, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

One the things we need to develop is the type of grid SORP recommend, with types of expense (salary, travel) on one axis and purpose of expense (projects, governance, overheads) on the other, giving a far richer and clearer analysis, as well as making full cost absorbtion clearer. We are working on this, both conceptually and in terms of the accounting software. I would hope the final version is able to be presented in this way. Johnbod (talk) 15:36, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Such a grid is useful in an appendix. I don't think it works as the actual plan, though - it's too hard to get the right about of detail into little boxes and the plan ends up being written to fit the layout, rather than the other way around. --Tango (talk) 15:46, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Pay rises

A 2% cost of living increase sounds a bit low. Year-on-year RPI for May was 3.1% (although it is forecasted to drop a little). I don't know quite how cost of living in London relates to RPI, but it's probably slightly higher (I believe the housing market in London is more buoyant than the rest of the country). And, of course, staff should be getting additional pay rises to reflect them having a year's more experience and to reward a job well done (assuming they have done well!). There is always a desire to keep costs down, but staff isn't somewhere we should be cutting corners - we need to attract good people and we need to keep the good people we already have well motivated.

A problem with having a small number of staff and an open budgeting process, is that you end up discussing individuals' pay rises in public, which doesn't feel right... Perhaps that would be an advantage of my suggestion above - merge the staff budgets into the programme budgets and then there isn't a need to separate out individual salaries. (The total spend for each programme and the total spend on salaries should be published, but the splits could be kept confidential, probably with the exception of Jon's salary.) --Tango (talk) 14:59, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

5.2 Wikiconference 2013

Is the £40k for Wikimania intended to be for the bid, or for initial work on the actual conference if we win? Or a bit of both? The decision on the bids is currently scheduled to be made 3 months into our financial year, so both do need to be allowed for in this budget. I think the intention is to hold a major conference in 2014 whether we win or not, so we can just allocate some funds to organising that conference and not worry at this point whether it will be called Wikimania or not. I think there should be a separate budget for the bid, which probably shouldn't be as large as £40k (it's only 3 months work, after all). --Tango (talk) 14:44, 3 July 2012 (UTC)