Community Resources/Reports/Grantee partners’ intended programming and impact 2022

All Wikimedia Foundation Funds reports

Grantee partners’ intended programming and impact
Wikimedia Foundation Funds, 2022

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

The goals of the new funding strategy were to align grants to the strategic direction, decentralise decision-making with a regional focus, increase funding and support to underrepresented communities, and provide support beyond funding, such as creating spaces for peer learning. The new funding strategy emphasises learning, partnership and iteration which has informed our approach to reporting. This year we are developing three reports based on the information that we have collected. The new funding strategy emphasises learning, partnership and iteration which has informed our approach to reporting.

This is part of three-piece year report 1. Funding distribution, 2. Grantees' programming and self-reported intended impact (this report), 3. Learning and feedback from grantees and Regional Funds Committees about the new strategy.

In September and October 2022 the Community Resources team will be facilitating learning sessions with each region to discuss the report and enrich this analysis and how that can impact programming and priorities in the future. This report is a recognition of grantees’ immense efforts and learning in partnership with the Foundation throughout the first year of the new Wikimedia Funds Strategy.

Wikimedia Foundation Fund Regions:

• Middle East and Africa (MEA)
• South Asia (SA)
• East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific (ESEAP)
• Latin America  and The Caribbean (LAC)
• United States and Canada (USCA)
• Northern and Western Europe (NWE)
• Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

Technical note:

The data for the report is based on General Support Funds (82 grants) and Alliances Fund (18 grants), which use the Fluxx application format which allows for this type of analysis. This represents 84% of the grant funding.  All the data collected in this report is taken from grantee proposals registered on Fluxx. For those interested in knowing more about the application structure and guidelines they can be reviewed here.

In the spirit of peer sharing and learning, we document and give some examples of specific grants in footnotes, this IS NOT an exhaustive list and more examples are provided in the Regional Summaries and can be added as part of our collective conversations. This may also feed into any Movement initiatives to map experiences and cases for knowledge sharing.  

The purpose of aggregating data is not to rank or value grantee’s work based on their level of contribution. It is important to first consider that data such as metrics should always be contextualised. However, aggregate data can perhaps serve as general benchmarks and be useful for grantees to review their targets -  comparing their targets with grantees with similar programs, funding, or contextual dynamics. They can also be helpful for newcomers that often express that they find it hard to set targets when initiating their work or for Regional Fund Committees to have benchmarks to facilitate their proposal analysis.

Structure of this report

This report is organised into 5 key areas of grantee partners’ work:

1. Attracting and maintaining contributors,
2. Content contribution,
3. Building organisational capacity,
4. Awareness-raising & advocacy, and
5. Partnerships

Each area is divided into sections according to questions that guide the grantee’s proposals and the “Theory of Change”:

For those who need a quick 10-min overview each section starts with  ‘key takeaways’. For a deeper look, you can navigate the full analysis with main data points and references to specific examples. In this analysis, we also highlight some tendencies in terms of region, grantee types, or programmatic focus.

Key takeaways

Challenges

• The challenges grantees seek to address can be classified into movement-wide challenges as well as broader free-knowledge or societal challenges.

• Movement Wide Challenges
  • Grantees are concerned about their limited or diminishing volunteer base and seek programming to expand and diversify the existing volunteer communities, whilst maintaining the existing engaged community. It is often seen as a difficult balance.
  • Contributing content that addresses knowledge gaps, raising awareness of the value of Wikimedia and free knowledge, and building organisational capacity and partnerships that can support their main goals.
• Societal challenges
  • Grantees believe their key tasks are to address “knowledge injustices”, promote media and information literacy skills (MIL), provide better information on global challenges  (climate change, human rights), and promote open access policies and preserve culture and heritage.

Strategies

• The leading strategies to address these challenges focus on programming related to Education (70% of grantees), Culture & Heritage (69%), and Diversity (69%).
• In terms of Movement Strategy, the leading  goals of programming are Sustainability of the movement and Leadership & Development. However, better collective frameworks are needed for Movement strategy implementation, for improving the understanding of the link between grantees’ work and the opportunities for creating new pathways and priorities.
• Recruiting new contributors is one of the main tasks for 65% of grantees. There is a growing focus on underrepresented groups, prioritising diversity in terms of geography, ethnic, cultural, racial, or religious backgrounds, and language.
• Grantees are starting to question the value of one-off activities/workshops and “edit-a thon formula”. They are keen to discover new ways of engaging contributors, by exploring diverse tactics such as ongoing activities for organised collectives, training on-Wiki skills with professional development opportunities, and shorter events that can engage more time-restrained audiences, but that can lead to continuous micro-contribution tasks.
• Grantees strive to make visible the different ways volunteers contribute - particularly their role in bringing in and retaining new organisers as the necessary step to multiply efforts to bring in other diverse editors. However, although many see this as more important than efforts to bring in editors, their stated strategies, such as outreach and training, evidence a continued focus on recruiting editor contributors.
• Grantees identify the need to have a better understanding of different audiences,  to create different volunteer paths, and a volunteer management system that enables them to effectively support, incentivise and track retention. This will require tools and investing in staff/team's skills, time, procedures and resources.
• 75% define skills training as key to their work of engaging volunteers. However, there are a variety of different concepts of “training”. While there is value in multiple initiatives and formats, there is a need for a coherent Movement-wide  system, with common and well communicated training paths, learning prerequisites, and measured outcomes to support grantees work.
• For 60% content contribution is a main focus. Grantees prioritise content gaps related to gender, geography, and language. Less prioritised are those related to socio-economic status and sexual orientation. There are some regional variations, with contents relating to cultural/ethnic diversity  more prevalent in the MEA and SA regions, whilst “topics of impact” are prioritised more often in LAC and USCA.
• 70% of grantees aim to contribute contents to 2 to 3 Wikimedia projects. However, for 67% of grantees Wikipedia is still the central focus. Overcoming its poor reputation in educational contexts is seen as a key challenge. Smaller language  Wikipedias are seen as key in the quest for knowledge equity, particularly in the MEA region.
• There is a growing interest in Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, as tools to service key partners by digitalizing and making more accessible their knowledge. However, there are challenges with measuring the use/quality of these contributions and documenting case studies.
• A surprisingly small group of grantees are working on smaller Wikimedia projects (such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource), mostly newer grantees in underrepresented communities in SA, MEA, and LAC. Whilst they are seen as easier entry points for knowledge equity, there are ongoing questions about the readership scope of this content and some uncertainty about future Movement-wide investments in these smaller projects.
• Many grantees, particularly affiliates, believe their work goes beyond content and contributors, as they play a crucial role in raising awareness of the value of Wikimedia and Free Knowledge, bringing in partners that add value to the Movement’s work, creating free content outside of Wikimedia projects and advocacy and influencing public policy. The ongoing challenge is how to better relate these strategies to movement priorities, to show the scope and impact of these efforts, given that many affiliates see these as central to their work.
• Likewise, many affiliate grantees’ see their value as key “connecting infrastructures or nodes' ' for Wikimedian communities within their regions and with the network of global affiliates. As such, they see themselves as giving the Movement structure, convening and giving voice to community needs and drivers of Movement Strategy. It would be interesting to see more explicit strategies and measurements of how they are providing this service to community members, particularly those who are not currently members of the organisation or closely connected to it - often “long-time” editors, as well as “Meta-Organisers”. Also, how they are investing in capacity-building and peer sharing with other affiliates as part of their main strategies.
• General Support grantees are seeking to develop their organisational capacity and structures, with regard to  “longer-term planning” on Movement Strategy,  “effective program delivery”, “sustainability” and “staff/volunteer management”. Improving governance, leadership development,  organisational diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), skills development in teams, are less mentioned in terms of priorities and strategies. It is a collective challenge to support grantees in measuring how these organisational capacities evolve with time and in ways that meet their contexts and needs.
• Community health and safety are a key concern in Movement Strategy discussions but these issues are not prioritised when talking about desired changes, programming, and what grantees hope to learn from their work.
• 31% of grantees’ are working with regional or global scope. They are mostly larger more experience affiliates across all regions, about half of which are in USCA and NWE regions. However it also includes affiliates in all other regions and some newer grantees and alliances fund partners.

Learning and evaluation

• There are very interesting questions about what grantees want to learn, the data collection, time and resources to answer these questions is limited.
• Grantees do not want to stick to the “core metrics'' around content and contributors. They are striving to tell fuller stories of their impact, particularly their value in skills development, raising awareness, bringing in key partners, developing future organisers, and acting as key Movement connectors and drivers of Movement Strategy. However, many do not have the team, resources, or tools to measure these in more depth and therefore limit themselves to the core metrics. This capacity should be built into funding and regional capacity-building initiatives. The Foundation needs to urgently invest in movement-wide tools to track contributors' journeys and retention.

Below are some graphs that capture the knowledge gap, thematic, and Movement Strategy priorities of grantees.

• 
  Thematic /programmatic priorities(applicants were asked to select top 3 priorities)
• 
  Movement Strategy priorities (applicants were asked to select top 3 priorities)
• 
  Knowledge Gap priorities - Contributors
• 
  Knowledge Gap priorities - Contents
• 
  World cloud of key challenges grantees want to address or changes they want to achieve with their work (over 30.000 words).

The top words are Wikipedia, Community, Knowledge, Content, New, Movement, Open, Institutions (often related to partners), Support, and Editors. It is interesting to note other terms that appear less, such as those related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Grantee types

Type A includes the smaller recognised or unrecognised user groups, many first-time grantees with more project-based initiatives, type B, the affiliates with some grant history that are growing in programs and professionalising their organisational structure, type C are affiliates with a longer tenure with a history of annual plan grants with several programs

This is not a definite or absolute classification. It is only an analysis of some common variables (with existing data) that allows us to see if there are commonalities or differences between grantees with some common characteristics. It is not meant to imply that there is or should be an aspiration to move from type A-C. Mapping different growth, sustainability, and welfare paths for organised groups within the Movements (for both recognised and unrecognised), depending on contextual challenges, interests, and needs, would be an interesting collective exercise. Many past Community and Foundation staff work in line with this type of analysis could be revisited.

Type	Common characteristics in terms of size	Grantee proposal type	Examples
A	Individuals, groups or recognised affiliates, mainly user groups with tenures of less than 3 or groups that are Wikimedia focused but have not been recognised. Will probably be smaller in terms of members (less than 30), and mostly volunteer-run. Many will not have established governance structures (such as boards or governance policies). They may be starting to engage with local or regional partners to develop their programs.	Many will have transitioned from rapid or former Project Grants or be first-time grantees. Most proposals will be more project-based focusing on 1 or 2 specific initiatives or programs with local geographical scope. Many will be focused on 1 or 2 languages.	Wikimedia Haiti User Group Wikimedia Bolivia User Group Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group
B	Recognised affiliated with longer tenure (more than 3 years). Will generally have more than 30 members and might have emerging governance structures and policies. They will probably have a history of 1 or 2 important partnerships that support their programs.	Many will have already received the former Project or Simple Annual Plan grants (SAPG) Most proposals will be to cover 2 or 3 different programs and a growing, but small staff A few  might be multilingual and have local and regional scope.	Wikimedia Colombia Open Foundation West Africa Shared Knowledge Macedonia Wikimedia Ivory Coast
C	These are larger affiliates, many of them recognised user groups and Chapters. Most will have more than 6 years of tenure and more than 50 members.   Many of them have several strategic partnerships, some of them over a course of several years. Most will have boards.	Many will have already had a history of +3 years of grants with this Foundation. Most proposals will be to cover a variety of  programs and a larger staff base. Many of them will have activities focused on a regional or inter-regional scope.	Wikimedia Argentina Whose Knowledge Wikimedia UK Wikimedia Ceska Republika