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wikiHow:Hybrid Organization
What is a Hybrid Organization?
wikiHow is focused on achieving our educational mission of enabling everyone on the planet to learn how to do anything. While we are organized as a for-profit company, we don’t consider ourselves a typical business. We’re a hybrid organization, which uses the power of for-profit business to accomplish a social mission.
To us, a hybrid organization combines the best elements of traditional businesses with those of nonprofit organizations:
- Like a nonprofit, wikiHow focuses on fulfilling its mission to help educate people for free.
- Like a business, it uses profits to finance its operations, innovate, grow, and have meaningful impact.
To date, wikiHow has succeeded at creating a significantly-sized, profitable hybrid organization, and we hope we can serve as a role model for other entrepreneurs and businesses to follow. The world would be a better place if more organizations succeeded at creating thriving public goods instead of focusing only on profit.
How does wikiHow make money?
wikiHow shows advertising that users can opt out of seeing if they choose to become a registered user. In fact, wikiHow is one of the few advertising-optional websites on the Internet. If you do not wish to see advertising here, simply create an account and log in.
What does wikiHow do with the money it makes?
Our top priority is to maintain and continuously improve our site for the benefit of wikiHow readers and editors. A healthy financial situation allows us to pay our staff well, which increases our ability to continue to attract the very best people to work at wikiHow. In times when wikiHow is profitable, we return money to founder Jack Herrick and his friend Josh Hannah, who fund wikiHow when it’s unprofitable. We also like to give money to charities (we’ve given over $220,000 to date .) When wikiHow is unprofitable, Jack will personally fund the site and take actions to make sure the site and mission are preserved through temporary financial troubles. wikiHow is constructed to survive financially through the multi-decade time frame that will be necessary to advance our mission. If you want to learn more about wikiHow and money, read this detailed forum post.
Does wikiHow accept financial donations?
wikiHow offers the option for visitors to our site to make contributions to help support our mission. As a for-profit company, contributions to wikiHow are not tax-deductible.
Is wikiHow venture-capital financed?
No. wikiHow has been entirely financed by its founder Jack Herrick, and to a lesser extent, his friend Josh Hannah. We have not met any external investors who match our desire to put our mission ahead of short-term profit. While it’s always possible this might change, and we recognize that having access to more capital would help us accelerate our mission, we currently think our self-financed structure is best aligned with our long-term goals.
You don’t want more money? Are you crazy California hippies?
Hmm, while we do live in California and some of us do like music from the 1960s, we don’t consider ourselves crazy. :) As a business, our goal is to be profitable, grow, and have even more impact. We just believe that being a “hybrid organization” structure is the best way to build a business that simultaneously benefits the world and shareholders. We hope more businesses will adopt this model.
Who owns wikiHow?
wikiHow “the company” is owned by its founder, Jack Herrick and some smaller shareholders. When the “company” does well, Jack and the other shareholders benefit financially as the owners. The software that wikiHow developed is owned by the general public, since it is freely licensed under the GPL, and available to download , and our Creative Commons page explains what is covered by our Creative Commons license.
Who works on wikiHow?
wikiHow is made up of a team of around 30 full-time staff members who work with experts to create content, and engineer, manage and maintain the site. In addition, volunteer community members from around the world help contribute to the site through their valuable knowledge and experience. Ultimately it's up to us all - the staff, readers, and users of the site - to help wikiHow grow and fulfill its mission of building the most helpful how-to manual on the planet.
