Grants talk:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach/Report2013-1

Haf haf hafy haf. Haf haf haf. Vrrr. Haf. ("Report accepted and thank you")

Thank you for this quality report with detailed descriptions of your activities and a good list of lessons learned, as well as a statement of impact! I think the lessons learned will be useful to others doing similar work, so thank you for sharing those.

We liked how you broke your impact statement out by strategic focus areas and that several these are tied directly to the movement's strategic priorities. (Note that credibility itself is not one of the movement's strategic priorities, while reach, participation, and quality are. Looking at this grant in terms of its impact on Participation as you are doing seems like a strong approach.) Your statement shows that impact may be discussed productively in the context of an interim report on a longterm project like this. Great improvements!

Are you in any way tracking the number of contributions or contributors that arise as a direct result of P&O funded activities overall? We see that you tracking this for some activities and not others: for example, we liked that specific metrics were included for activities like Wiki Loves Monuments (number of articles, participants) and also for some other programs. We realize that this grant is consolidated from many smaller projects, but it could be interesting to see some consolidated metrics that make a clear case for the outcomes of your project overall, perhaps broken down in a table so that it would be easy to understand.

Best, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:10, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm glad you've found the report useful. As for total contributions tracking, I'm afraid it would be very complicated given the nature and diversity of activities. It's easy to count uploaders and categorized photos in WLM, but it's near impossible to track contributions of exhibition attendees or people who have heard a radio show. While I strongly believe activities we support should have a measurable results, I would hesitate to put these kinds of numbers into a single column (even if they were available somehow). Nevertheless, if you have any doubts about whether any particular endeavour was a good use of grant funds, we're always willing to discuss and explain our decisions. --che 21:16, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the response, Che.

First, we're not expressing particular doubts about the project with this comment, just working toward improving metrics as WMCZ develops its programs.

We agree that it can be challenging to track the outcomes of some types of outreach activities, but there are opportunities to track some activities better. For example, it's possible to track the number of people that visit a booth at an exhibition (although it may be far more difficult to track their future contributions, as you point out). Similarly, it's possible to track the number of people who attend a presentation or event, and many groups do survey participants to learn more about the outcomes of an event. A radio show is more a difficult case, but even statistics on numbers of listeners might would allow you to at least understand the number of people possibly reached through a given activity (although you probably can't track how many people chose to participate as a result of hearing it). We definitely understand that quantitative metrics like that are not the only way to understand outcomes and results, but it does help to have them when they are available.

Tracking these kinds of details might be something you consider working toward as your programs continue to develop. As you measure more activities, you may also find that there are some opportunities for discussing the outcomes of your grant overall. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:35, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

The Mediagrant and P&O grant are two separate grants

We're a bit confused to learn that you seem to conflate the Mediagrant and P&O grants funds. These budgets should be considered separately. These are two separate grants and money should not be moved from one project to another. The way this report is formatted is not problemlematic, as funds are clearly reported for each project; we just wanted to clear up any possible confusion around this point right now.

Thank you, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:10, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

As you probably know, the communication in time when these grants were conceived was not the best, and some of their conditions were not very clear. The funds have arrived in a single transaction and are kept on a single bank account. Since we're not exactly close to using alloted budget for either grant, and we have (public) records of every penny spent, it won't be a big problem to separate those. --che 21:16, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

We acknowledge that the communication around these consolidated grants was indeed not very clear in some respects, and we are glad to learn this is a simple matter to sort out. We're happy to discuss or clarify anything else that might seem unclear. We also do sincerely appreciate your detailed and public record-keeping. Best, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:35, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

Financial update. Rough estimates (using today's rates) suggest we've so far used 12772 EUR of grant's 15600 EUR budget. This leaves us with ~2800 EUR, which should be quite enough for our main plans for the near future -- this year's WLM and wiki-conference. I'll be going through our banking records to find the exact CZK amount (because partial currency convesions and bank interests start to play a role here), but it looks like we'll be either asking for additional funding or concluding the project withing the next 6-12 months. I'll post more info when I have the final numbers. --che 17:47, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

This sounds like a good plan as long as you are confident that WLM and the wiki-conference fit within the scope of your grant. We think it would be best to conclude the grant in December of this year. At that point, any funds remaining may be returned or reallocated to a new grant request. Regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 23:11, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Reporting schedule

P&O has a six-month reporting schedule, as outlined in the approved grant submission and this report was submitted extremely late. Not receiving regular reports for a longterm ongoing grant like this is not acceptable, and submitting regular reports is a condition of your grant. Please ensure that your next report is submitted no later than 15 December 2013 and covers six months of activity from May through November. If you anticipate any problems with submitting this report on time, you should contact grants at wikimedia dot org before the report is due.

Do you think a more frequent reporting schedule (for example, a report every three months) would help you stay on track with respect to submitting more regular reports? If so, we could consider implementing one.

Regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:10, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

There's not much to add, such a late report was a gross omission on our side. One of the contributing issues was that preparing a quality report takes time, and members of the committee have been very busy lately. While we'll be taking steps to rectify that problem and ensure this won't happen again, I feel that preparing more frequent reports would increase the workload even more, so our preference would be to stay with the current schedule. --che 21:16, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable. We will keep the reporting schedule as is, and hope to see future reports submitted on time. We appreciate you taking those steps to ensure more timely reporting, and also appreciate your engagement in discussions about these reports. Please let us know if you have questions about reporting at any time. Regards, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 01:35, 11 June 2013 (UTC)