How we are funded

WeMove Europe’s financial and political independence is our guiding light. We do not allow the pursuit of financial stability to get in the way of our independence. We will not take funding from corporations, governments or state institutions to ensure we can continue to direct campaigns on issues related to corporations and remain politically independent. We work with donors who do not impose political conditions that restrict our mission or limit our independence. Our funding currently comes from individual members across Europe who support our work (95%) and progressive foundations (5%).

We want to be transparent and accountable about how we are funded and how we spend your donations. The information below is intended to do that. If you have questions or feedback on how we present this information, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Where does WeMove Europe get its funding from?

The core of our budget is made up of small donations from thousands of people across Europe, many of them donating each month with a regular donation. Being people-powered also means this, each of us donating what we can afford. The average donation is around €16, but it varies and every single donation, whether €1 or €500, helps us achieve our mission.

Support from members across Europe has proven strong in 2023. Income from member donors reached the same as the year before, 2.3M euro, making it 95% of our income in 2023. Other income sources were progressive foundations and partners (5%). A more detailed breakdown of our income over 2023 is available below.

Regular monthly donations from our members go towards funding campaigning activities, campaign costs, campaign materials, action days and other necessary support to make our campaigns impactful. The effort required to translate and localise the content produced in 7 languages is massive. We take the question of data privacy and security extremely seriously. Our platforms and tech team work hard to build and customise tools that make our campaigns successful while protecting our online security and privacy. Find out more in our privacy policy.

In 2022: 2,398,000 € total expenditures (Campaigns & Tech for campaigns 1,723,000 €; Fundraising for campaigns 274,000 €; Operations & Governance 401,000 €)

Will I be kept up to date regarding what happens to my donation?

Whether you donated for a specific campaign, a campaign tactic, or have set up a regular monthly donation to the organisation, we will let you know where your donation has gone. This information will almost always come in one of our emails that reports back to the whole community on the success of a specific campaign, action or tactic. But if you have any questions feel free to drop us a line at donation@wemove.eu.

What happens when you raise more money than you need for a given campaign?

WeMove Europe has very rarely been in this position. If we raised money for a tactic regarding a specific campaign (ex. Newspaper ad) and more money was raised than needed, it would go towards another tactic for that campaign. If we were to be in a position where more money is raised than necessary for a specific campaign, the donation would go towards funding campaigns on a similar topic. If this is not possible, the donation would go towards researching more campaign opportunities or tech development for new campaigning tactics. It is also important to note that donations raised do not determine how much staff capacity is put into winning a campaign.

What happens when you raise money for other organisations and movements?

WeMove Europe works with an incredible network of movements and partners across the continent. There are normally two different scenarios in which we raise money that involve other organisations.

The first is when there is an action that we are running together or contributing to, with partners. It could be buying up billboards across Brussels; organising European-wide polling on an issue we work on; contributing towards a climate march in a specific city; contributing to legal fees of a joint legal action we are taking with partners; etc. In these cases we agree beforehand how much WeMove could contribute to the specific action. We then turn to the community. If more is raised than needed for the action, the excess money goes towards other actions to help win that campaign (maybe instead of taking out one newspaper ad, we could take out two, or instead of “just” polling, we also have money to hire media experts to help distribute the results across Europe, etc.). If we don’t raise enough funds, we still contribute to the action, taking money from the budget we have allocated for that campaign.

The second approach is when there are specific moments where we believe the most valuable impact the WeMove Europe community can have is by raising funds directly for organisations or movements. For example, during the 2016 protests in Poland against a draconian law to fully ban abortion in the country, the WeMove community raised €16,000 for women’s groups in Poland to fight this law and for women’s rights. Another example is when during the harsh winter conditions in 2017, refugees stuck in Greece and Serbia were facing below zero temperatures with no shelter, clothes or food, so the WeMove community raised €70,000 to go to organisations helping people in these countries survive the winter.

After these two incredible experiences, we noticed that around 5% of the money raised went to administrative fees (bank costs, credit card fees, internal and external accounting costs, etc.) which WeMove was spending in order to be able to donate the entire sum of the donations to the organisations. So we decided that with future crowdfunding actions for other organisations and movements, 95% of those donations will go directly to the intended beneficiary, and 5% will be retained so as to cover the administrative fees.