Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group/2021

APG approved in the amount of 29,139 EUR

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 29,139 EUR, with a grant term starting 1 January 2021 and ending 31 December 2021. We are recommending a partial increase in the budget of 17% to help alleviate Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group’s challenges of capacity and operations.

Historically, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group has succeeded in three programmatic areas: Education, GLAM, and Outreach. These programmatic areas are also reflected in their current annual plan. The goal of the Education program is to collaborate with educational institutions and use Wikipedia during the educational process. The User Group hopes that with this program they can address the quality and quantity of Albanian Wikipedia. In order to achieve this goal, the Albanian user group will collaborate with different organizations, extend the education activities by establishing new Wikiclubs and engaging new editors. Through the GLAM program, WMALUG wants to partner with a few organizations, extend the current partnerships in order to generate quality content and improve Wikimedia projects. Finally, the Outreach program aims at promoting UG activities, free knowledge and at reaching out to wider audiences.

The current annual plan’s structure is clear and has proven that it is solid; it is similar to the last year’s annual plan in terms of goals, measures, and activities. We especially appreciate User Group’s work on the well defined SMART objectives for individual programs.

We see the capacity issues that the User Group has been experiencing and approve hiring of two full time staff members. We hope that with this change the Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group will increase the chapter sustainability and diversity of its activities, as well as decrease the volunteer burnout.

Taking into consideration the current annual plan’s similarity to last year’s plan and the budget limitation on our end, we are approving the requested budget partially. We approve the grant in the amount of 29,139 EUR out of requested 32,915.00 EUR. The approved budget breakdown is as follows:

• Staff expenses - 16,800 EUR (fully funded expenses for 2.0 FTE staff)
• Operations - 3,920 EUR (fully funded)
• Programmatic expenses - 8,419 EUR (increase not funded, last year’s budget kept)

We understand that this reduction in funding will affect some of User Group’s activities, and that they may not be able to pursue all the opportunities they have proposed in the application. However, we recommend finding new strategies to organize the planned activities, for instance, by running some of the offline events online, thus reducing the event costs substantially. As they finalize planning given this funding decision, we recommend updating the current plan, budget, and metrics accordingly.

We are looking forward to working further with the Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group this year.

Best regards, SAPG Committee and Staff --DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 14 December 2020 (UTC)