Wikimedia Hungary grants

The National Civil Fund (recently renamed after Sándor Wekerle, a former prime minister), the Hungarian grant giving arm of the European Social Fund has granted Wikimedia Hungary 250 000 HUF ($1300) to cover its operating expenses between 1 July and 30 September, in particular, the grant funds the development of an online payment gateway for our bank built on CiviCRM, and for producing printed materials.

This is the third grant in a row that we have won and the justifications of the grants show that we are getting better at it, reflecting both on our grant writing skills and more so on our activities.


($1 = 190 Hungarian Forints)


Apart from the raw numbers it is interesting to compare the ratings given to our application. In the case of the operating costs grant they look at the quality of applications as well as the demonstrated ability of the applicant to effect social good on a national scale.

For the 2010 grant we got some harsh criticism noting that our social impact was not proportionate to our operating expenses, that we couldn't convincingly prove that we have national scope and that the ratio of income generated from profit-oriented organizations and economic activity was low.
It should be noted that with the 2010 grant, we were still a very young organization and due to the timing of the grant we could only rely on financial statements dating back to the year we were founded (in November 2008 – comparing 2 months of expenses with the request for 12 months of support can lead to some disproportionality); also, our not charging for our activities to generate economic income is no cause for alarm.

The 2011 grant, for some strange reason only covers an arbitrary 4 month period (instead of a year, as previously), most of it in the summer when activity levels plummet; this has made the job of coming up with a good and meaningful program plan difficult (the biggest chunk of our expenses, the contract fees of our accountant, is due in December); therefore, we opted for activities that can be outsourced (the CiviCRM development) or for which we have the material ready (the printed materials we printed earlier, although I hope to expand our collection).
In the end, we put together a grant that was quite favourably judged:

(If some of the criteria seem strange, or there are inconsistencies, they are inherited from the original.)