Welcome to the Organizational Effectiveness Questionnaire. Taking this Questionnaire is the first step in using the Wikimedia Organizational Effectiveness Tool, which consists of a Questionnaire, a User Guide, and an online Learning Center to help your organization understand and use the results. Before you proceed, you may want to read the User Guide on Meta-Wiki. After taking this Questionnaire and receiving your results report, you may consult the OE Learning Center (also on Meta) to help your organization use and understand the results. The overall purpose of these tools is to help your organization understand the ways it has impact and make a plan to leverage strengths and address gaps in effectiveness.

Background The Wikimedia Foundation has initiated a project with TCC Group - a consulting firm focused on social impact - and the larger Wikimedia community, to help Wikimedia organizations (including chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups) improve their effectiveness and their ability to have impact for the movement. As part of this work, we are creating a self-assessment Questionnaire that organizations can use to understand how they are doing with strategies that may be essential for all or most Wikimedia organizations, as well as how they are doing with specific strategies that may not be used by all other organizations. In order to create the Questionnaire, User Guide, and Learning Center, TCC Group conducted a survey of Wikimedia organizations and a series of interviews to identify the different strategies Wikimedia organizations are already using. All of these materials evolved with the support and guidance of many different people within the movement includung chapters, thematic organizations, user groups, and members of the Affiliations Committee. The contact for this project is Winifred Olliff at the Wikimedia Foundation: wolliff@wikimedia.org.

What is this Questionnaire? The Questionnaire consists of a set of questions your organization will answer and an accompanying Learning Center to help your organization interpret the results. WMF may consider further developing this Questionnaire, if it is useful, to automatically generate customized reports for the organizations that complete the survey.

How do we use the Questionnaire? Before you begin, we recommend that each organization nominate one respondent to be the “point-person” for TCC and the Wikimedia Foundation, someone with overall responsibility for the tool and who will receive your results. Please have that person send an email to Winifred Olliff (wolliff@wikimedia.org) and Rika Gorn at TCC (rgorn@tccgrp.com). We suggest that between 3 and 7 individuals from your organization complete the Questionnaire on their own. These individuals should be volunteers or staff who have a deep understanding of how your organization operates, including how it makes decisions, what activities or strategies it engages in, and how its budget is allocated (if applicable). If you are working with multiple organizations, please choose the one that you work with or know the most about. Remember that candid responses to these questions will help your organization get the most out of this process, and that individual responses will not be shared with the Wikimedia Foundation or other Wikimedia organizations without your permission. The Questionnaire usually takes about 30-45 minutes to complete. If you have technical difficulties please contact Rika at TCC.

After all of the individuals in your group have completed the Questionnaire for your organization, your group’s point-person may request the aggregate results and use the accompanying User Guide and Learning Center on Meta-Wiki, to interpret and discuss the results. In this way, your organization can use the Questionnaire to understand your organization’s strengths and its gaps in effectiveness, and strategize about how to leverage those strengths and ad
Who will see my results? We want to make sure this Questionnaire is useful to organizations and that individuals can respond openly to the questions here. So, individual results will not be shared with the Wikimedia Foundation or other Wikimedia organizations without the permission of the respondents. Your results will be compiled by TCC Group as part of an aggregate report about how Wikimedia organizations understand their own effectiveness, which we hope will be useful to the movement. In this report, findings will be averaged across many organizations so that individuals and individual organizations are not identified. Please contact us if you have concerns about having your responses included in this report.

Your organization’s group will see its own aggregated results, but the results of individual respondents will not be shared with your organization.

What do you mean by “Wikimedia Organization”? Is this Questionnaire only for formal organizations? Throughout, we use the phrase “Wikimedia Organization” to refer to chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. We use the word organization to refer to both formal organizations and informal groups. We hope this Questionnaire will be as useful to user groups as it is for Wikimedia chapters and thematic organizations, although we realize that some questions may be more applicable to one type of organization than another. If you find that this Questionnaire is not well-suited to your organization, we encourage you to share that feedback with us at the end of the Questionnaire so that we can improve future versions of this tool.

Why does this Questionnaire have different sections? This Questionnaire has three sections. Section 1 asks some basic questions about how you work with your organization. Section 2 includes topics related to effectiveness (“core strategies”) that we hope are applicable to most or all organizations (these might be topics such as volunteer recruitment or community engagement). Section 3 addresses specific strategies for effectiveness used by some organizations (these might be program strategies, such as organizing events or doing advocacy work). You will have the chance to indicate whether each strategy is applicable to you before you are asked to answer the questions associated with it.

We recognize and appreciate that many people participating in this Questionnaire may not use English as their first language. If you have any difficulty understanding questions or any other aspect of the Questionnaire, please reach out to Winifred Olliff (wolliff@wikimedia.org).
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