Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Community Engagement and Advancement/April 2015

Notes from the Quarterly Review meeting with the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Engagement and Advancement (Fundraising and Fundraising Tech) teams, April 13, 2015, 3:30 - 4:30 PDT.

Please keep in mind that these minutes are mostly a rough transcript of what was said at the meeting, rather than a source of authoritative information. Consider referring to the presentation slides, blog posts, press releases and other official material

Present (in the office): Anne Gomez, Caitlin Virtue, Luis Villa, Adam Wight, Lisa Gruwell, Katherine Maher, Damon Sicore, Lila Tretikov, Siko Bouterse, Rachel diCerbo, Erik Moeller, Terence Gilbey, Tilman Bayer (taking minutes), Edward Galvez, Floor Koudijs, Jake Orlowitz, Garfield Byrd, Pats Pena, Kourosh Karimkhany (for part of the meeting), Marti Johnson; participating remotely: Maggie Dennis, Megan Hernandez, Geoff Brigham, Andrew Russell Green

Terry:
Welcome

Community Engagement

Presentation slides

Luis: previous QRs set a mix of 3 and 6 month goals, this time we focus on 3 month goals
start with teams that do work across the board, then team that work with newer users, then the teams that work with more experienced editors, then WP library which focuses on experienced users

Learning & Evaluation

slide 3

[slide 3]

1. outreach to get more data
2. data quality
3. teach
implementation vs. program: e.g. WLM is a program, WLM 2014 in Argentina is an implementation
3. e.g. "photo contests work well under these conditions: ..."
Lila: always some % that's not measurable, but need to be aware of it
Luis: there is also insight from data from programs we did not fund
Lila: does the dept have goal to be proactive instead of reactive?
Luis: L&E is good on that front, e.g. global metrics
e.g.: find signs that WLM is plateauing, feed that back to program leaders - perhaps they want to focus on different programs next year
Edward: do a lot of consultations with dept and external with community members
Lila: should communicate best practices
Edward: one of the outcomes is toolkits, best practices

Success/miss/appendix slides

Community Resources

slide 8

[slide 8]

Luis: over to resources
Siko: formerly known as Grantmaking - includes our 3 main grant streams, Wikimania, some emerging community work
Inspire campaign was our big project in March, focused on sourcing ideas
in Q4, we will start funding and executing
success not just in terms of numerical targets (# of proposals was exceeded, etc.)
all on target
emerging communities: Global South
this one is yellow because we changed plans
planned for self-assessment, but Asaf realized soon this would not work
so switched to interviews
Lila: expected outcome?
Siko: actionable framework
on how these communities develop
Lila: studying successes?
Siko: yes, e.g. Arabic community
but also others
Lila: when will we push out this framework?
Siko: Q4
some benchmarking research, organizational effectiveness
focused on socialization within movement
considering the department's transition, we deprioritized this
Lila: would love to see more impact objectives
Luis: expect new hire to be very helpful in that respect
Lila: agree with [de]prioritization

slide 11

[slide 11]

Terry: how much money did we grant? (compared to projection)
Siko: see slide 11
differs seasonally, e.g. because of IEG, FDC rounds
right now close to plan
Lila: where does support for events live? (PEG)
Siko: still the same
Lila: where is it in this deck?
Siko, Luis: in Community Resources
not surfaced / called out as priority in Q3 goalsetting
--> consider calling out goals for events/PEG in Q4
--> Lila: interested in friendly space success

Success/miss/appendix slides

Education

Floor:

slide 17

[slide 17]

mentor worldwide, track contacts systematically
next step: figure out how much we want to do
Lila: hit yearly goal refers to content that is directly attributable to education program?
Floor: yes, measurable thanks to the education extension
Spanish Wikipedia: newer, still working
Wikimetrics not yet widely used there
will put a lot of work into WIkimania edu preconference
launched edu toolkit
Luis (explains): toolkit is about sharing best practices
(Floor:)
communications: eduation newsletter, Facebook group
put a lot of work in newsletter over last year
Luis: numbers may sound small, but remember these readers are program leaders/multipliers
Lila: should have alignment between teams - cross-organize e.g. re Global South with emerging community work
Luis: need to be open to people coming to us, can't always initiate

Success/miss/appendix slides

CE/Community Liaisons

slide 23

[slide 23]

Rachel: usually objectives aligned with Product, this time a bit different
Luis (on SUL): ... and half of these users took care of themselves through process that Keegan set up
Geoff: have we done full testing of SUL ahead of April 15, considering the upcoming elections?
--> Rachel: will double-check with Kunal, but I understand yes
Erik: C-levels will be briefed about this tomorrow
Terry: hiring...?
Rachel, Luis: took longer due to (other staff changes)
Lila: how do you feel about VE rollout?
Rachel: pretty good, did exercise, some concern about slowness of templates
Lila: ...
Rachel: real test will be A/B experiment in a few weeks
Luis: let's take discussion elsewhere

Success/miss slides

Community Advocacy

slide 27

[slide 27]

Maggie: ...
Terry: need to figure out how to better handle this kind of thing during transitions

slide 28

[slide 28]

Maggie:
visits from WM Russia and AffCom, successful
Call to Action - waiting...
Luis: leaving out a lot of dependencies here, many other people contributed
Lila: strategy consultation yielded a lot of interesting and diverse input
Luis: takeaway - we can explore new ways of doing such things
Lila: ArbCom important to be closely involved with
Luis: more generally, people in community-selected roles...

slide 29

[slide 29]

slide 30

[slide 30]

Wikipedia Library

slide 32

[slide 32]

Jake: already met Q4 goals for # of partners, ...
new partners easy to get now, increasingly major players with non-English content
slow on new branches
Lila: any GLAM partnership goals?
Luis: no, not what team worked on in the past
Jake: I went to GLAM consortium meeting
growing interest from European GLAM community about who could do things like that at WMF, e.g. best practices
--> Lila: let's talk about which programs [possible involving GLAM work] to focus on next year

Success/miss/appendix slides

Presentation slides (abridged)

Advancement (Fundraising)

slide 2

[slide 2]

Lisa: I will briefly cover department goals in general
monetary goal reached, 14% above it right now
Lila: how much overperform in Q2?
Lisa: would need to look this up
[slide]Country campaigns
Megan: took best banners from US campaigns, tested in other countries
did all campaigns (channels: desktop/mobile/email) in all countries (except Denmark: no email)
Lila: why these big differences in increases between countries?
Megan: had a big raise in some countries before already [i.e. started on a high level]
in Israel, picked low-hanging fruit: solved RTL issues and switched processor
Lila: how often do you test radically different approaches?
Megan: do both
start out with rough translation of best English banners, but also try out other things
Lila: really important to do this
Megan: tried to ask for recurring donation on mobile, but hurts donation rates
[slide]
appendix:
reader survey
positive, encouraging for us
banners do not affect reading experience negatively
--> Lila: Recurring stats should be a KPI.

Success/miss slides

FR Operations

[slide] appendix 4
Pats: ...
Luis: Geolocation issues [category for donor emails] means?
Pats: e.g. if donor receives form for wrong country

Foundations and Major Gifts

Caitlin: good quarter
caging company (which processes fundraising mail received for us) was sold, necessitating an unplanned migration to a new company

Fundraising Tech

slide 6

[slide 6]

Adam: PCI (credit cards processing) was top priority, exceeded goal
tech debt on donation interface, want to resolve it before open sourcing it (e.g. talking to archive.org)
Terry: last goal was aggressive because?
Adam: consists of 3 goals, blocked by lots of interdependencies, e.g. CiviCRM upgrades

Success/miss/appendix slides

Terry, Lila: thanks
Lila: much easier to understand highlights in this format

Terry: yellow goals should be red or green instead