Annual Report 2023/Story: Material to Lay a Good Foundation for Association Involvement

Access

Use

Community

Enabling

Community

2023

This story focuses on the extensive work that we did in 2023 to lay a good foundation for increased association involvement and thus more members. Through this long-term work on membership recruitment, our democracy develops, more voices are heard in our activities, more people can be involved in various tasks and they can become the ambassadors for the association in their own networks. In addition, having more members means more opportunities for advocacy work, as well as for different applications and fundraising for our initiatives.

As a non-profit organization, the work to be done by Wikimedia Sverige is based on our members' needs. At the annual general meetings they decide on our overall direction and activities. Despite this, we have often been bad at concretizing the ways in which members can get involved in the association, and how they can deepen their involvement.

To change this, Wikimedia Sverige has been working actively for several years to develop an idea program, which will contribute to a stronger identity within the association, as well as guidelines for association involvement, which will contribute to creating more opportunities for our members to participate (see a previous Story here). In 2023, we made major progress in developing these two documents, which lay a necessary foundation for the communications officer we hired in 2024 to boost our work with member recruitment and fundraising. It is crucial that our efforts to recruit new members are a long-term process and that new members are offered the opportunities and information they need to continue prioritizing an active, involved membership in WMSE in the coming years.

We started working on our idea program by running a survey on our members in 2022. We got replies from almost 100 individuals, that is nearly a quarter of all the members we had that year. It was probably the most eagerly answered survey in our history, which gave us a really good foundation upon which to continue developing our idea program. In 2023, we organized meetings for our members and invited them to give their feedback on the idea program and to confirm that the way we were heading with it was in line with their expectations. The idea program, with the contributions of our members, workers and the board, will finally be adopted at the annual general meeting in 2024.

The guidelines for association involvement have also been developed a lot in 2024. When an association grows rapidly, there is a high risk of growing pains, so one needs to build the structures and methods to deal with them at the same time. The guidelines are essential in this context, and for this reason, the fact that they were almost completed in 2023 was prerequisite for membership recruitment in 2024.

In summary, the idea program and the guidelines for association involvement will put us in a much better position to grow in the future, acting as a good foundation for deeper and broader association involvement.