Campaigns/Organizer Framework

What is this page?

Welcome to the first draft of an organizer framework to support folks who are interested in organizing content campaigns and contests in the Wikimedia Ecosystem. This is an early draft composed by User:Astinson (WMF) and User:SGill (WMF). We are still experimenting with the documentation, and need your help better understanding what makes sense, doesn't make sense, what is missing, and what you would like to learn more about.

Please leave us feedback on the talk page or on the discuss space.

In this page, we are operating under a general definition for content campaigns:

• Campaigns summon contributors and focus them on a topic or means of contribution for a window of time.
• Contests or challenges are a type of campaign, typically more focused on established Wikimedians, primarily focused on quality content, and usually with a reward.

Note: that this does not include communications campaigns, marketing campaigns or fundraisers.

The Framework

Idea Generation

Why do campaigns start?

Campaigns frequently start in a number of unexpected places: a meeting of different Wikimedia movement organizers with different skills coming together and identify a shared initiative. Some examples include:

• Wiki Loves Monuments, an iteration on a previous less-than-perfect attempt to do photography campaigns in museums in the Netherlands;
• #1lib1ref and Women in Red, which both coalesced around conversations related to Wikimania in Mexico City;
• Art+Feminism started as a series of conversations between activists;
• CEE Spring and Wikimedia Asian Month were both driven by a desire to increase collaboration across their respective regions; and
• Wiki Loves Africa started as a way to inspire communities across Africa to organize in the Wikimedia movement.

Common goals

Meta Organizers who coordinate campaigns are frequently inspired by different goals including:

• Filling content gaps
• Onboarding newcomers
• User retention
• Working with or meeting the goals of partners or funders
• Expanding the capacity of local communities
• Satisfying a personal agenda

Increasingly with a focus on the Movement’s Strategic Direction, Campaigns should focus on achieving the various conditions needed to make Wikimedia the “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. These conditions might include inviting new participants in our mission or filling gaps in fundamental or important knowledge.

How do you generate ideas?

When designing campaign ideas, it's important to ask the following questions:

• Who is the audience for the campaign and why will it appeal to them?
• Will the theme or topic of the campaign include both existing and new community members?
• What are the simple tasks that new contributors can do as part of the campaign?
• Does your organizing community and the audience for the campaign have sufficient expertise to participate in that theme or topic?

Once you have an initial answer for these questions, we recommend iterating on these ideas with others, to explore different campaign ideas and tactics to meet these goals. We suggest:

• Convening a mix of existing community organizers and allies or partners you hope to activate to generate ideas. The Movement Organizers research highlighted how in-person collaboration allows for greater creative collaboration and trust.
• Focusing on contribution models that can appeal to both experienced Wikimedians and newcomers.
• Encouraging participants to think creatively about how to achieve the shared goals: many communities choose comfortable approaches to contribution because that is what they know or personally motivates them (i.e. soliciting “anything goes” editing events where newcomers don’t know how to identify a topic, or running editathons, which, across the movement, don’t have high retention of newcomers). Some of the most successful campaigns in the movement have relied heavily on organizing strategies and practices that are not “typical” within the Wikimedia movement.

Campaign Preparation

The bulk of the work for making a successful campaign involves the core team who coordinate a campaign. The first iteration that a team runs typically requires a larger investment in developing materials -- because they don’t have materials from previous iterations of the campaign or need to adapt materials from other campaigns.

Sometimes the amount of time and energy invested in the first several iterations of a campaign may be disproportionate to the amount of content or community activated because of this startup investment. In subsequent iterations of running the campaign, certain kinds of work will decrease because of the ability to reuse messaging or other kinds of materials built in previous iterations, but other kinds of work may increase as the team try to iterate based on community feedback, or as more communities want to participate in the campaign.

Questions to ask before preparing for a campaign:

• How much time or energy is my team willing to invest?
• Does the team envision this campaign or contest being implemented only once? Or is this going to be iterated on multiple occasions?
• At the end of the campaign, what outcome will be enough for my team to feel good about the work? Does the team agree on that outcome?
• Does my organizing team include people with the different skills I need to be successful?
  • If working with volunteers, is there enough redundancy of key skills in the team, that it would be okay for someone to step back from the work because of changes in their life situation?
  • Note: Many themes and topics will require some knowledge of supporting that community (i.e. understanding the storytelling strategies, practices or field of knowledge of interest to the target community)

Key Components	Approaches	Further Reading and Tools
Gather resources, allies and partners	At the beginning of a campaign, organizers typically consolidate allies that they want to partner with and make sure that they are interested and able to contribute to the campaign. Partners typically include a subset or mix of the following kinds: Wikimedia partners Wikimedia partners coordinate regional or local outreach and organizing for the campaign and may be able to provide additional capacity and support of different types. Local teams may be associated with an affiliate, or be independent. #1lib1ref and Art+Feminism rely on designated regional volunteer ambassadors to support these local teams. Content and expertise partners Provide expertise about knowledge and communities involved in a topic. Art+Feminism, the Music in Canada @ 150 project, and #1lib1ref all leaned heavily on knowledge of experts and activists familiar with the topic. Provide access to books, research materials or media files that can be used to inspire or support a campaign. For example, working with a particular museum or expert collection of content might drive the focus of an editing events. Communications partners Communications partners give reach beyond the communities that normally pay attention to Wikimedia. For example: #1lib1ref relies heavily on international and national library associations to spread the word. Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth connect with photography and UNESCO organisations to find participants. UN Human Rights supported WikiGAP as a way to grow the campaign's reach and focus. Resource partners Monetary and non-monetary resources for a Wikimedia campaign can come from several sources -- grant funding from the Foundation or a Wikimedia affiliate, partner in-kind investment in the campaign, or other external funding. Hosting partners WikiGap, BBC 100 Women and the Amnesty and Wikipedia campaigns all relied heavily on local hosts associated to provide space and expertise. Local hosts can help with communication and outreach to participants.	Learn more about: Wikimedia movement affiliates Partnership and Resource Development Portal, for developing partnerships in the movement
Build worklist and design participation	Creating a Worklist Most campaigns or projects have a list that focuses contributors. New contributors don’t know how to find their own topics on Wikimedia projects, and experienced contributors often want a simple and easy way to get started on an unfamiliar topic. A strong worklist reduces the amount of time new participants have to spend “figuring out where to start” and focuses them on the campaign activity . Examples listsincludes: Wikipedia – Women in Red/Redlist Index Wikimedia Commons – Wiki Loves Monuments geographic lists (e.g. the U.S. Listing on Wiki) Wikidata – the European Migration Vocabulary For further examples, see this blog series on lists in the Wikimedia Movement. As Wikidata becomes more complete and tools using Wikidata become more end user friendly, Wikidata lists can be a strong foundation for the workflist: for example, the Women in Red is transitioning much of their data to Wikidata to create greater visibility of potential women biographies across all Wikimedia communities, and Wiki Loves Monuments is converting their database to Wikidata. Building a worklist can be a valuable contribution to the Wikimedia ecosystem. Running a small crowdsourcing challenge to create the list can be a way to activate more experienced contributors before the campaign. Consider running a content drive with Wikimedians, librarians or experts before the main campaign focused on building the list(s). Tools can strengthen the ability to "access" the list. Dynamic interfaces for campaigns helps lower barriers to contribution: for example, Listeriabot is used for creating lists for projects like Women in Red; Commons campaigns have a number of new tools ISA is used to run "depicts" campaigns and mapping tools help photography campaigns, such as WikiWakacje for Poland's WikiVacations ; WikiDaheim for Austria’s WikiDaheim and MaCommune for France's Ma Commune Wikipédia. Designing participation strategies Make sure to identify a simple and targeted ways for the intended audience of the campaign to participate. Here are some examples: Micro-contributions: #1lib1ref uses the Citation Hunt Tool to turn what could be an overwhelming category of options, especially on larger Wikipedias, into a manageable micro-contribution task. Similarly, we have seen successful shortterm ISA challenges Small focused actions: Wiki Loves Monuments is focused on a clear activity: taking photos. In order to simplify this activity the Wiki Loves Monuments Community has developed two simple interfaces for contributing to this content: Wikipedia-driven lists with clear upload buttons using Commons Upload Campaigns for images, and the Monumental tool helps communities running a Wiki Loves Monuments Campaign to create an engaging and simple access point for contribution. Similarly, proofreading events on WikiSource have cleared focused actions that don't confuse most participants. See for example Indic Wikisource Proofreadthon. Larger open-ended tasks: Writing full Wikipedia articles is a complex task for new contributors, especially in larger Wikipedias. Focusing editors on smaller tasks that require less knowledge of the on-Wiki community will likely make newcomer participation more successful. After several years of encountering heavy scrutiny and complicated deletion conversations, the Art & Feminism organizers iterated to focus participants on existing articles about Women in the Arts instead of creating new articles. Campaigns like Project Tiger, Wikipedia Asian Month and CEE spring focus on existing editors in their tactics. Contests like the WikiGap Challenge, Menu Challenge or UNESCO Challenge have all been very productive but appear to reach an "upper limit" in terms of people able to or inspired to participate. Also, very few newcomers participate. Rewards Adding an element of contest or rewards can improve the motivation of some participants, especially experienced Wikipedians. There is also the risk of creating a perverse incentive, leading to too much of one kind of contribution (i.e. rapid low quality, machine translation of content or adding unnecessary data to Media Files or Wikidata). If you plan to judge the content for rewards, prizes or recognition of participants you will want to develop a scoring strategy appropriate to the participation method. Here are some examples: Wikimedia CEE Spring 2019 Wikidata Menu Challenge English Wikisource Tenth Anniversary contest WikiGap Challenge Organizer participation strategies In addition to the content contribution strategy, you may have to develop a strategy for soliciting organizer support from local communities. For more information on this, see the Package activities for communities to replicate step below. Designing participation Note that you may not have to design for all of these types of contributions in the first iteration. Most campaigns design for a main focus during the first iteration, and then adopt and support good ideas or contribution strategies developed by participants for subsequent versions. For example, #1lib1ref started with only the Citation Hunt tool in mind and not anticipating the in-person events which became central to subsequent editions; Women in Red didn’t use Red Link Lists, even though that is one of the currently most distinctive components of the project; and Art & Feminism didn’t anticipate needing to support events globally, but was focused heavily on supporting the content writing in its early stages.	Worklist Tools Wikidata Queries — queries can be the foundation for other tools to represent data. In particular, two generic tools are widely used for campaigns: Listeria creates on-wiki lists that “print” a Wikidata Query via a bot. One of the most complex and exemplary example of Listeria in use is the Women in Red red-list index, which identifies potentially notable women from Wikidata. Tabernacle allows for editing of Wikidata items in a table like environment good for adding properties and translating labels and descriptions. Inputs include the Query Service, PagePiles, and PetScan -- a tool that allows users to mix features of the Mediawiki structure and API (i.e. Categories, Namespaces, etc) with the Wikidata Query Service. Outputs can be turned into Pagepiles, On-Wiki tables or a number of other formats. Targeted list building tools -- some topical areas and Wikimedia communities have created more targeted list-creation tools, such as the Wikimedia Cultural Diversity Observatory Top Article lists. Using Categories or on-wiki lists -- historically the primary “list building” strategy on Wikimedia projects these take advantage of the skills that many Wikipedia editors have. However, data captured in Categories or on-wiki lists is limited, and can’t be easily reused by software or other language communities. Special:SpecialPages and Database Reports -- there are a number of special pages and reports generated by bots or other Wikimedia tools that might provide a good foundation for campaigns. However, many of these are inaccessible or hard to use by newcomers -- consider building a list with Petscan instead. Contribution participation tool examples Citation Hunt (1lib1ref) Monumental Campaign pages on Commons AutoWikiBrowser (WikiProject India Tag & Assess 2012) Do you have a favorite tool? Suggest it on the talk page. Organizer support tools Running activities Training for Wikipedia editathons Planning a Wikidata Workshop guide See the Monitoring Participation section for more information.
Develop messaging and timeline	Timing and timeline Contests and campaigns can have a duration as short as a few days or a week or as long a month or multiple months. Depending on the activity you are doing, different audiences will have different attention windows. When designing a campaign, make sure to evaluate your timing and timeline on the following: What kind of attention span does your primary audience have? Campaign audiences have different tolerances for different lengths of time: for example, experienced Wikimedians participated in the Bengali 10th Anniversary Proofreading Contest for 7 months while #1lib1ref campaigns tend to begin to lose energy with newcomers after 2-3 weeks. To increase the reach of #1lib1ref, the #1lib1ref organizers support 2 international campaigns annually to reinvigorate energy, while encouraging local communities to run #1lib1ref events in other parts of the year. Campaign organizers may choose timelines and scales that are based on their capacity and a need for building a network of support: both the Music in Canada @ 150 and the WikiEducation Year of Science Campaigns stretched activities out of the course of a year, in order to provide time and space for the outreach and capacity building they needed for such a series of events. How much energy and commitment will the core organizing team be able to put into supporting communications? Especially when engaging contributors or doing outreach to a professional or activist that hasn’t engaged Wikimedia deeply before, it’s important to do consistent and regular communications both before and during the campaign. Will local organizers need lead time to organize their local events and activities? If you are asking local organizers to facilitate events, preparation time may be as short as a few weeks to a couple months (Editathons and photowalks can usually be organized in that amount of time) to several months to half a year (country-level Wiki Loves Monuments teams take several months to form and effectively organize, and the Wiki Education Foundation’s Year of Science was dependent on the academic school year). What is the best time on the calendar? Some campaigns are anchored around appropriate events on the calendar, i.e. many of the Gender campaigns in the movement happen in or around Women's History Month (such as Art+Feminism). Aligning with international days or events can strengthen the visibility of a campaign, but can also reduce the impact of a campaign if that campaign gets lost in the communications about the event. Moreover, the Wikimedia Movement has a very busy calendar of events, campaigns and activities (see the Discuss Space calendar). Though its impossible to completely deconflict campaigns with all movement events, it might be important to not host, for example, photography events that would conflict with major international events if your target audience is also involved in Wiki Loves Earth or Monuments. Messaging Throughout the campaign or contest, it is important to have consistent messaging that helps broadcast the participation in the campaign and that local communities can translate, customize and localize for their needs. Some audiences, like very committed Wikimedians, will show up and participate in a campaign with limited outreach and communications. However, especially for external communities or networks, it's important to develop a strategy that appeals to that audience’s needs. During this activity, organizers typically: Build a communications plan with a clear messaging strategy for allied communities and target audiences as well as the on-wiki Wikimedia community (i.e. using Massmessage, Geonotices or CentralNotice). Write a launch blog post and/or press release designed to inform the broader community and interest from the public. Develop visual design materials that give the project a distinct shared visual identity. Ensure there is a plan for social media (identified “champion” social media handles, an identified hashtag, etc). Contact Management Most external-facing campaigns maintain some sort of contact tracking strategy among the meta-organizers or on each local team’s tracking environment. There are typically two types: Spreadsheets or lists -- maintaining some type of collaborative tracking document (usually in Google Sheets) for maintaining information or contact lists. Onwiki lists can be useful for contacting Wikimedia communities. Contact Management System (CMS) - Part of the scalability of the Art+Feminism and WikiEducation Foundation’s Year of Science campaigns was the use of robust CMS software that is designed for communication campaigns. At this moment in time, there is no centralized software solution for this in the movement.
Package activities for communities to replicate	Some types of campaigns have in-person events or multiple local digital activities. If you intend to run these activities, it is important to provide guidance for organizers from multiple organizations, contexts or levels of experience in the Wikimedia movement can replicate it. Organizer focused toolkits from existing campaigns include: Art & Feminism provides a clear package of training materials for running an event -- the event kit includes a mix of “best practices” for running editing events, that include both small pieces of advice (like addressing the 6 accounts per IP limit issue) as well as a suite of teaching and training materials. #1lib1ref iterated after the first year of the campaign to provide a newcomer oriented “Coffee Kit” for participants who want to run “coffee hour” activities as part of the campaign. In the first year, the organizing team recognized that folks were running small editathon-like events as part of the campaign. During the second year of the campaign, the team created an explicit invitation for first-time organizers, and iterated on that documentation as they identified other challenges (i.e. by adding increased guidance on how to use the Programs and Events Dashboard for that kind of activity). Wiki Loves Monuments maintains an organizers kit focused on creating a national level campaign for each participating country, focused on the technical steps for each part of a national campaign. Unlike the Art+Feminism and #1lib1ref kits, the Wiki Loves Monuments kit includes more focus on technical workflows that assume more knowledge of Wikimedia projects. New organizers may face unexpected challenges. If planning for local community activities, meta organizers might need to help local organizers connect with infrastructure or event partners. In Art+Feminism, the central organizers distribute the organizing packages alongside support connecting with Wikimedia trainers and other resources needed for the local event. In both Wikimedia Sverige’s partnership with the Swedish Embassies for WikiGap and BBC 100 Women editathons and the Amnesty and Wikipedia event supported by Wikimedia UK, the affiliate supported connecting local partners with Wikimedia Communities.	Editathon trainings and resources: Art+Feminism Organizing Kit Programs and Events Dashboard Editathon Training #1lib1ref Coffee Hour Kit

Campaign Engagement

Campaigns in the Wikimedia movement typically have a very intense time bound contribution window, where a virtuous cycle of contribution, monitoring and communication can be used to increase the level of participation. This virtuous cycle is not always organic: participants may not be very good at communicating or recruiting more participants to the campaign, and it's important to support newcomers to the Wikimedia community to make sure that on-wiki local communities don’t bite newcomers so they stay engaged in the event. Developing a plan for monitoring and supporting the contribution is important for building and maintaining momentum in the project.

Before the Campaign Engagement Window, consider asking yourself the following questions:

• Is the organizing team ready to support newcomers and participants in the campaign? Do you know how to monitor and supporting participants?
• Have you begun preparing update communications, so that it is easy to send out updates to participants during the campaigns?

Key Components	Approaches	Further Reading and Tools
Targeted contribution	If communications and participation strategies go well (see above description) individual contributors and local communities will start contributing to the campaign. If contribution does not happen how you hoped, consider reevaluating your communications or contribution strategies with the following questions: Is the messaging for your target audience working? Does your message have a clear story for impact for that audience? Do the channels you are using reach your target audience? Do you need endorsements or support from more allies or partners in the space? Does the participation methods you designed make sense for your target audience? Do you need to iterate, provide better documentation or simplify the contribution strategy? Are there context barriers preventing participants (i.e. do the expected participants need digital skills)? Are the participants getting enough training or clear instructions to participate? Do you need to sponsor more training? Many campaigns, contests or newcomer invitation strategies don’t work in their first iteration: that is okay; iteration and learning from these experiences is how the WIkimedia movement identifies gaps and opportunities for new activities.
Monitoring participation	Work with local teams, judges and reviewers to monitor the quality of the content being created and provide feedback to the contributors. Most events or campaigns devote time and energy as part of the campaign to finding high quality example content for communications and for showing examples of ideal content for folks who are just beginning to participants. During contests, it's important to monitor and provide feedback so that contributors have an opportunity to improve the work that’s not up to expectations from the community. Moreover, most campaigns involving newcomers encounter deletion or other both negative and positive community interactions. In 2020, two campaigns with a high volume of newcomers doing small edits (May #1lib1ref and #WPWP) both encountered a small percentage of newcomers creating disruptive edits on big Wikipedias. The organizers for both campaigns had to a) identify this problem, b) communicate with communities noticing the problem about how they planned to address the problem, and c) working with partners and affiliates to retrain the communities of newcomers. If you would like to learn more about the experience, see this blog post interview of the WPWP organizers.	Tools: Hashtags (#1lib1ref and #WPWP) Fountain tool (Asian Month) Outreach Dashboard (Art+Feminism and article Alerts) Event Metrics WSContest tool (Rabindranath Month Contest 2019) Using Related Changes for Campaign/Contest Categories using Templates (Punjab Edit-a-thon 2016)
Communications for engaging contributors	Provide regular updates such as weekly statistics, leader of the day, etc., to motivate existing and engage new contributors. Communications often highlight the participation of communities and stories about individuals involved in the campaign as a way of both encouraging strong participants and reminding other participants of the opportunities related to the campaign. Here are some good examples of ongoing communications about the campaign content: The #1lib1ref team maintains a leader tracking tool to encourage high-volume contributors to keep contributing. #1lib1ref and Art+Feminism encourage local events to share pictures and descriptions of those local events on social media and then use central media handles to spread that content. WikiProject Women in Red maintains an ongoing stream of updates about important or interesting content, especially focused on identifying articles for deletion and quality content. Projects like Art+Feminism and Women in Red typically have volunteers who look for articles that can be promoted within English Wikipedia into DYK and other statuses – as a way of recognizing quality content by organizers. In Wiki Loves Monuments 2019, some communities used the Quarry tool to reengage contributors from previous years

Campaign Followup

Campaign followup is a really important component of organizing campaigns: it is an important part of the long-term impact of campaigns, a moment where high quality contributions and organizing can be recognized, impact communicated, and lessons learned shared with the broader Wikimedia movement.

Key Components	Approaches	Further Reading and Tools
Follow-up and re-engage contributors	Followup communications Judging If the contest wants to identify and support some type of recognition or scoring based on quality or quantity of impact, you may need a planned judging process. For example, Wiki Loves monuments goes through several rounds of first National Level and then international level judging of photographs using the Montage Tool. Announcing Winners and Awards Many contests or campaigns have competitive rewards. Some projects focus on intangible awards, such as barnstars, recognition through award ceremonies, or supporting the content as featured content. Other projects provide something tangible: internet access, gift cards or cash rewards, swag, or materials. Consider getting more tangible rewards as in-kind donations from partners. When announcing Winners, consider creating a blog post, press release, or other broadcast of the content -- its a good way to educate the public about how individual contribute to Wikimedia projects. Examples include the annual announcements from Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth. Moreover, award ceremonies can be good ways of taking something that sometimes feels abstract (contributing to an online community) and make it practical. Moreover Award ceremonies are good ways to encourage press, partner awareness, and recognition of volunteers. Reengagement To ensure contributor retention, create a follow-up plan for notifying and engaging folks after a campaign. Some campaigns and contests, like WikiProject Women in Red, have natural “homes” for ongoing participation after the campaign -- developing a WikiProject for ongoing contribution is a good way to do that. Other projects like #1lib1ref and Wiki Loves Monuments rely on local organizing teams to keep track of participants, and engage them in local Wikimedia activities. Encouraging local organizing teams to work with local Wikimedia affiliates to keep them and campaign participants involved involved. Most programs, outreach and campaigns in the Wikimedia movement do not have high ratios of retention of newcomers. Consider running experiments with your campaign and community to improve retention and sharing those experiments with the broader movement.	Tools: MassMessage Judging tools Montage – a tool for judging photography campaigns Fountain -- provide judging tools for working on Wikipedia articles and WikiSource. WSContest tool -- provides a judging framework External wordcounter (Punjabi Wikipedia Article Improvement Edit-a-thon) See Monitoring and Participation tools for more tools that may help.
Evaluate and report	Evaluation is important for campaigns and contests in a number of ways: first it can help articulate the impact of the work for sharing and communication subsequent the campaign; second the visibility of impact can encourage others to participate in future campaigns or create their own inspired by your work; and last by learning from what did and didn’t work when organizing an event. Reporting impact Most campaigns have impact reports of some sort, to help both individual participants and the wider community see and understand the impact of the work. These reports are also useful for helping partners and funders understand the work that you have completed. Here are some example reports: Wiki Loves Birds Report Annual #1lib1ref Reports Year of Science Evaluation Report Wiki Loves Africa Wiki for Human Rights Suggest another example on the talk page Describing learning and identifying next steps Campaigns involve iteration, experimentation and often innovate in how Wikimedia communities. Some communities describe the learnings in the general reports (see Reporting Impact) but additional reflections on what worked, what didn’t work and how to implement improved support for the program can also be helpful.	Tools: Fountain tool Outreach Dashboard Wikimedia Quarry (India Independence Day Labela-a-thon 2018) Google Sheets (Punjab Edit-a-thon 2016) Specialized results tooling: http://whgi.wmflabs.org/ https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikiloves/