Over the last several years, many of my colleagues and I have been approached by individuals asking for our advice and feedback on program plans, grant proposals, and other documents related to Wikipedia and education initiatives led by other organizations or individuals. While we’re generally happy to support these mission-aligned ideas, we are finding they’re redirecting too much of our valuable staff time away from our own programs, without compensation. That’s why we’re launching a new consulting services program, offering our staff’s expertise on Wikipedia programs to organizations and individuals for a fee.
I can understand why so many people reach out to us: The Wiki Education staff are the world’s leading experts in facilitating Wikipedia work with educational institutions. Since 2010, we’ve started programs from scratch, scaled programs, adapted based on challenges, and learned a lot along the way — all while ensuring our efforts support both Wikipedia content development and the learning objectives of our participants. We know how to make Wikipedia initiatives successful, and how to avoid common pitfalls that derail well-intentioned efforts.
But one of those common pitfalls is letting others’ needs distract you from your work! We’ve reached the point where we need to ensure our staff is concentrating time on our own efforts — or that our organization is compensated for our expertise. Our new consulting services offering allows us to protect our staff time resource while still offering organizations and individuals our support if they are able to pay for it.
One caveat to our new fee-for-service model: We’re happy to waive any fees for consulting on grant proposals that include financial support for Wiki Education in a collaborative project. We appreciate collaborating on grant proposals that further both our strategy and the strategy of our partners, and we are happy to waive all consulting fees for proposals that recognize our staff time is valuable and include financial support for our organization in the proposal. Fees will also be waived for any Wikimedia organization, as part of our participation in the global Wikimedia community.
See the page on our website about our new consulting services for more details, and reach out to contact@wikiedu.org if you’re interested in working with us. We’ll pair you with the staff person whose expertise best matches your needs to get a conversation started.
