Community Resources/Reports/Grantee partners’ intended programming and impact 2022/Awareness-raising and advocacy

All Wikimedia Foundation Funds reports

Grantee partners’ intended programming and impact
Awareness-raising and advocacy

• Key takeaways
• Contributors
• Content contribution
• Building organisational capacity
• Awareness-raising and advocacy
• Partnerships
• Regional learning sessions

Executive summary

“We are trying to eliminate the belief that Wikipedia was made for just some people and it can not be trusted.” (grantee MEA region) Challenges:

• challenges, particularly in contexts where there is a negative image of Wikimedia content, particularly Wikipedia, and/or where there is less knowledge about the multiple ways knowledge can be made free and accessible through Wikimedia projects.
• This is also associated with addressing societal challenges such as limited knowledge about open access policies and copyright, internet freedom, the freedom of information and media systems, addressing digital gaps and digital rights, and countering misinformation. This has been a struggle when working with partners from outside the open movement/government stakeholders.
• There is also an internal challenge associated with raising awareness about Movement Strategy within existing Wikimedian communities, particularly those not closely connected to affiliate or global Movement-related work.

Strategies:

• Some of the common strategies involve developing workshops or presentations with a variety of stakeholders such as GLAM institutions, government bodies, non-governmental organisations and educational institutions. However, the continuity and scope of these activities can often be limited to the grantee team’s bandwidth and measuring impact of these spaces can be more difficult to measure.
• Other grantees go beyond general information-sharing and are supporting institutional partners to embrace open access practices and incorporate Wikimedia projects within these practices.
• Educational programs raise awareness among education actors to counter the narrative that Wikipedia is unreliable,
• Some grantees are raising awareness in more specific areas, such as around knowledge equity, human rights, decolonisation, protecting culture & heritage, etc. and do this through structured campaigns, training resources and communications strategies.
• Fewer grantees talk about tactics to make their specific organisation more visible and to raise awareness of the Movement as such and how it operates.

Learning and evaluation:

• It would be interesting to discuss what are the specific outcomes we hope to see with this awareness raising and ways to find if the tactics used are effective and how this could be measured. About 30% of grantees explicitly talk about awareness raising as a key outcome in their programs. Perhaps this is an issue of making it more explicit in their desired programmatic outcomes. Or starting from a shared understanding of what it means to raise awareness or what impact looks like.
• For those working in educational programs, particularly in the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom framework, there are clear guidelines on how to include awareness raising metrics and tools to measure this, however more grantees need to formally incorporate this into their grant proposals metrics and evaluation tools and it should be facilitated with specific funding and technical support.

Detailed report

Challenges grants want to address/changes they seek

Creating greater awareness is seen as one of the grantees' main challenges, particularly as people are not aware of the value of Wikimedia and the impact of content on the world, and how to contribute in diverse ways. Primarily, how to raise awareness of the value of Wikimedia as one of the world’s most accessible Open Educational Resources globally, particularly amongst key stakeholders such as teachers, GLAM staff, policy-makers, activists, and journalists that can often have a negative image of Wikimedia content, particularly Wikipedia, for being “unreliable”.

Societal/ free-knowledge related challenges:

• Promoting the Freedom of information and media systems, particularly for grantees in countries that face threats of political manipulation of information or capture by monetary, political, or partisan interests.
• Ensure that the internet provides not only factual, relevant, and free knowledge, but also mechanisms for participation and agency in political and social life.
• The need to develop media and information literacy skills and counter misinformation and “fake news”.
• Promoting new spaces for discussion and advocacy of open access public policies and a greater understanding of intellectual property, copyright, and digital rights to respond to the needs of the national debate.
• Countering the vulnerability of information that is of public interest. Eg. Platforms that the government and government-controlled institutions use to publish data can often be subject to cyber attacks that may lead to data loss.
• Responding to the decline in internet freedom in some countries with many journalists, activists, and bloggers facing harassment and violence.

Strategies

Given that a lot of grantees, particularly affiliates, discuss the value of their work beyond bringing in content or edits, in raising this awareness, it would be interesting to discuss what are the specific outcomes we hope to see with this awareness raising and ways to find if the tactics used are effective and how this could be measured. About 30% of grantees explicitly talk about awareness raising as a key outcome in their programs. Perhaps this is an issue of making it more explicit in their desired programmatic outcomes.

• Raising awareness of the value of Wikimedia and open access

More one-off strategies that reach wider audiences:

• Some of the common strategies involve developing workshops or presentations with a variety of stakeholders such as GLAM institutions, government bodies, non-governmental organisations and educational institutions. However, the continuity and scope of these activities can often be limited to the grantee team’s bandwidth and measuring the impact of these spaces in terms of changing institution’s knowledge of open access policies, attitudes and practices can be more difficult to monitor and measure and more continuous processes may be needed.
• Grantee’s often call for more introductory contextualised, updated and peer-reviewed research about the impact of opening access to knowledge for partners and consumers. This would be important material to support this advocacy work, as affiliates may find themselves alone in this task of finding, documenting and presenting these cases.
• Other grantees are also doing this as one-off events or training workshops in schools or universities, seeking to change negative perceptions of the educational use of Wikimedia projects (mainly Wikipedia), raising awareness of its value as an open educational resource, particularly for developing MIL skills. There are some initiatives to reach more remote areas with this type of advocacy campaign and information literacy. As with GLAM institutions, an ongoing challenge is to measure the impact of one-off events in schools and universities. On one hand, they may reach a wider audience, but it may not lead to changes in perceptions or practices in the longer run. An ongoing challenge is how to embed this in teaching practices and curriculums both at a university and secondary school level.  

More continuous engagement:

• Other grantees go beyond general information-sharing and are supporting institutional partners in their transition to digital environments and integration with Wikimedia projects, both at the level of their access policies, training professionals, and opening their knowledge bases. This involves training on intellectual property, copyright, and digital rights and participating in national debates on policies related to these issues. Another alliance fund partner is seeking to raise awareness within the open tech community to engage with climate action movements.

Other less common strategies:

• Promoting new spaces for discussion and advocacy of open access public policies: There are some institutionalised efforts that have been ongoing in the NWE, CEE and USCA region, and there could be an opportunity for more widespread technical support from the Foundation to communities in this area. It may be interesting to explore courses on open access for professionals in different sectors (GLAM, educational, government), and even seeking to include this in law courses as students may be important advocates for this in the future.
• Raising awareness about knowledge equity and topics of impact: Other grantees working in areas related to human rights, decolonisation, culture & heritage are working on raising awareness around these issues and their connection to the free knowledge ecosystem and Wikimedia as a tool, and they do this through a series of strategies, such as structured campaigns, partnerships, and communications, and training opportunities.
• Raising awareness of open access and in times of crises/wars: some grantees have started to raise awareness around the impact of crises/wars and the preservation of culture & heritage, this has been put on the public agenda, particularly with the situation in Ukraine and other ongoing crisis (fires, conflicts, climate-related crisis, illegal trade, neglect, etc.) that may put culture and heritage at risk and are seeking to get involved in partnerships that address this and seek integration with Wikimedia as a form of prevention,protection and safeguarding.
• Raising awareness about the Wikimedia Movement and how it works: Fewer grantees talk about tactics to make their specific organisation more visible and to raise awareness of the Movement as such with all of its complexity.

Learning and evaluation

What are some of the things grantees want to learn about their work?

• Which strategies work more to promote awareness
• What is the non-editing impact on students and teachers?
• Does the impact of oppressive and authoritarian regions affect citizen’s desire to know and share facts?

What are grantee partners measuring?

It is interesting to note a lack of metrics related to measuring greater awareness through grantees’ efforts. In fact “awareness” is only mentioned 8 times in key aspects grantees want to learn about in their learning questions. Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom has created some tools to measure changing perceptions amongst teachers and educational institutions, perhaps some of these could be adapted for wider audiences, with the necessary support to manage data collection and evaluation.

• Given that it is difficult to measure this on a broader scale, particularly with wider audiences reached through media outreach and policy and advocacy strategies through partners, it may be interesting to do this through third-party surveys or by partnering with national research and survey institutions to see if Wikimedia - free knowledge awareness questions could be included in ongoing surveys.  It may also be interesting to think of some proxy indicators that can show that there is greater awareness such as increase in readerships or donations in a particular locality, coverage in local media or new policies that promote free knowledge.