Grants talk:PEG/Wikimedia Community Ireland/WLM 2016

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members decisions

GAC members who support this request

1. This is a well-done proposal with clear goals and measures of success that indicate to its cost-efficiency.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 22:08, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
2. rubin16 (talk) 15:08, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

WMF Comments

Hi Sameichel. Thanks for this grant request -- we are happy to see continued activity around WLM in Ireland! We have a few comments/questions on the request: Hi Alex Wang (WMF), thanks for your questions. I have answered them below in bold.

1. Taking advantage of the Centenary year of the 1916 Easter Rising by adding a focus area for the photo and writing contests is a great idea! Thanks! It was really a no-brainer as there has been so much coverage for the centenary.
2. In last year's report you wrote about making the following improvements for 2016: (1) recruit more volunteers; (2) Increase the amount of promotion through legacy channels (print, radio, television); and (3) Promote more events outside of Dublin. Are these still relevant and if yes, please let us know how you are working to achieve them. All three of these goals are still relevant. (1)We are struggling to recruit more volunteers. We've tried several different approaches (meetups, mailing list request, Twitter) none of which were very successful. (2)To increase promotion we need to do more PR. This is the main reason we are asking for PR funds for this event. (3)We have struggled with holding events outside of Dublin because most of our volunteers are in Dublin. We are planning on hosting at least one event in Galway in conjunction with the writing contest.
3. Do you have a sense of the percentage of Ireland's monuments that are already covered in Wikipedia with articles/photos? As your experience with this photo competition grows, it is often a good metric to begin tracking and making specific outreach efforts targeted at covering previously undocumented monuments. According to our figures we have 967 monuments on our list. 25% of these monuments have their own articles (we are not counting monuments that are mentioned on other pages, such as towns and cities). 52% have at least one image. This is a stat we have been tracking since the beginning. The first year (2014) we had 271 monuments photographed (54% of the 503 available). In 2015 we increased that to 508. As we are already expanding the scope of the 2016 contest, I think it would be too much to target specific underrepresented monuments this year. That will definitely be one of our goals in 2017.
4. We would recommend adding a usage goal as one of your measures of success. 15% is typically a good goal to have. At the moment we have 6% usage of our 2015 images and 9% usage of our 2014 images. I have added a goal to reach 15% this year. We will encourage users at our writing contest events to use images from the 2016 contest in their articles.
5. We encourage you to take a look at the Writing Contest Toolkit and additional resources for writing and editing contests. Thank you for that resource. It is very helpful!
6. 1,500 EUR for PR (in addition to the 1,000 EUR you expect to receive as a government grant) is significant. Please let us know what these funds will be used for, the expected outcomes, and how it relates to your other measures of success around participation and content. We realise this is a large sum for PR but we feel it will benefit the contest immensely. In 2015 in the 5 days after the launch of the contest, which was when our PR was active, we had 626 images uploaded, 38% of the total images for the entire contest. During the same 5 days in the third week of the contest we had 146 images uploaded (9% of the total). We think that have PR available for the middle weeks of the contest will improve the outreach thereby increasing the amount of images uploaded. The PR will also be helpful in promoting the 1916 image contest and writing contests, which are completely new for this year. Here are the quote specifics were received from our PR company:

(1)Consultation with project team to discuss the project and finalise PR plans and key messages (2)Drafting and issuing a press release to national broadcast, online and print media (3)Following up with these media with a view to securing interviews for project spokesperson (4)Issuing the national press release to local broadcast and print media with instructions that local details are online (5)Drafting and issuing update press release to local and national media during middle week of competition (6)Drafting and issuing press release announcing winning entries, along with copies of winning photos, to national and local print and broadcast media (7)Following up with these media with a view to securing interviews for project spokesperson (8)Summary report on media coverage Cost €2,500 ex VAT (16.5 hours of work at €150 per hour). We have worked with this company for the past two years and have increased our reach year on year, even with only an initial week of coverage. We would like to take our PR to the next level.

Looking forward to your responses. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:29, 19 July 2016 (UTC) Thank you for your support and guidance. Please let me know if you need anything else from me. Shannon

Grant approved

Hi Shannon. Thanks for your thoughtful responses to our questions. We are agreeable to supporting the PR costs to see what impact it can have on the contest. We encourage you to work with the PR company to create workflows and materials that can be easily replicable for future events by the user group, taking into consideration your group's capacities. We don't think it's as sustainable strategy to invest so much in PR for each event. Hopefully you'll get some good templates and strategies to use going forward. Thanks again for your efforts and we look forward to hearing how the contest went! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:36, 25 July 2016 (UTC)