Annual Report 2025/Fail Fest: Limited capacity, hard prioritization, and significant underspending

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2025

In this fail fest, we describe how limited capacity, high external demand, and administrative burden led to underspending and delays, but also what we learned from it and how these experiences strengthen us ahead of 2026.

In many ways, 2025 was a year in which our appeal outpaced our capacity. Demand for our expertise increased, not least through helpdesk requests and contacts from UN bodies and other international actors. In several cases, interest in collaborating with us was greater than we had previously experienced, and in a number of processes we were also able to put agreements in place. At the same time, we lacked sufficient operational capacity to turn these collaborations into concrete content and activities. When key people were unavailable, bottlenecks arose that affected the entire chain from idea to implementation.

This became particularly clear as we worked on international requests connected to the UN system. We had the ability to initiate dialogues, build relationships, and in some cases formalize our collaborations, but not sufficient staffing to turn them into structured work plans, deliverables, and follow-up. As a result, several collaborations remained dormant during the year or were only partially activated. This was frustrating, but also instructive. We gained a clearer understanding of how resource-intensive international partnerships are, especially when they involve complex organisations with high demands for coordination and administration. We have also had a clear ambition not to drive these processes on our own, but to actively involve other Wikimedia affiliates and actors within the Wikimedia movement. Creating joint initiatives in which more parties have influence, responsibility, and concrete benefit requires more time for anchoring, dialogue, and coordination.

There were also delays on the technical side. Development work on Wikispeech and CommonsDB progressed more slowly than planned, with fewer hours invested in the projects. In both cases, this was not due to a lack of capability or relevance, but to limitations in available working time. At the same time as our organization was growing, recruiting, and onboarding new staff members, the internal burden of coordination and administration increased. Alongside project implementation, we also needed to invest time in procurement, reporting, financial follow-up, HR processes, and structural development.

One consequence of this situation was that parts of the budget were not used to the extent planned. The funding was available, and we knew that the organization needed more staff, but recruitment, onboarding, and building up structures take time. In such a year, a significant share of energy and resources goes into investing in the organization rather than maximizing delivery on our programs. This means that not all initiatives are immediately visible in activities or outputs. At the same time, it is precisely these investments in people, ways of working, and structure that create the conditions for greater impact in the future. The capacity built up during the year is something we expect to be able to translate fully into results in the coming operational year.

The experiences of the year have therefore strongly influenced how we view planning and prioritisation going forward. It has become even clearer to us that a year of expansion must be regarded as an investment phase, in which the focus lies on building stable structures and sustainable staffing rather than pushing for maximum results. This means that some results were consciously postponed in order to create better conditions further ahead. In practice, this has led us, in our planning for 2026, to place greater emphasis on realistic start-ups, the gradual scaling-up of projects, and a clearer link between staffing and delivery.

At the same time, the year has given us a deeper understanding of how delicate the balance between growth and capacity is. For a period, expansion can actually reduce immediate implementation, because time and energy are spent on recruitment, onboarding, coordination, and internal development. Only once the new structures are in place and staff are fully operational can the organisation begin to work at the pace the funding makes possible.

This fail fest is therefore not about our ambitions having been misguided, but about the fact that the timing between investment and impact is not always linear. We made a strategic choice to build for the future, even though this meant that the programmatic work temporarily did not reach the scale we had hoped for. With strengthened capacity now in place, we are better equipped to turn both existing and new collaborations into concrete activities. Our hope is that other organizations that are in similar phases of development will recognize themselves in the fact that a year of investment and capacity-building may sometimes look quieter from the outside, while in reality laying the groundwork for much greater impact in the future.