Grants:Project/Rapid/Wiki In Africa/Wiki Loves Africa 2019 Contest Communications

statusFunded

Wiki In Africa/Wiki Loves Africa 2019 Contest Communications

This application is to ensure that the communications during this continent-wide contest reaches far and wide during the contest period. The contest draws entries from across Africa and beyond, and while communications are pushed by local country teams in focus countries, this contest communications is to both reinforce their work and reach photographers, creatives and people interested in entering in other territories and ways.

targetCommons

start date1st December

end date30 April

budget (local currency)USD1995

budget (USD)USD1995

grant typeorganisation

non-profit statusnon-profit

grantee• Islahaddow

contact(s)• isla

wikiinafrica.org• isla@wikiinafrica.org

organization (if applicable)• Wiki In Africa

website (if applicable)• www.wikiinafrica.org

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Project Goal

Briefly explain what are you trying to accomplish with this project, or what do you expect will change as a result of this grant. Example goals include, "recruit new editors", "add high quality content", or "train existing editors on a specific skill".

Wiki Loves Africa is an annual competition that celebrates the diversity inherent within the geographical space called Africa. It encourages the contribution of culturally specific images and media around a universal theme to Commons to assist in alternative illustration of subjects on the Wikimedia projects. The project is now in its 5th year, and has resulted in thousands of images being contributed to Commons.

The WikiLovesAfrica project is considered across Africa as a game-changing competition that not only highlights the need for better, more and more authentic images and recordings of Africa, it also delivers on this need by proving an open-source repository of such images for creative commons use. Wiki In Africa intends to use this grant money to hire a local communications organisation, Rabbit in a Hat, to drive the continental noise around the contest. Rabbit in a Hat managed the social media campaign for Wiki Loves Africa in 2017 which saw a 66.2% increase in people entering the competition, and a 57% increase in media contributions over the previous year. Rabbit in a Hat has subsequently worked with the Wikimedia Foundation on the PR and communications for the Wikimania 2018 Conference and so has a full appreciation and understanding of the goals and ethos of the Wikimedia community.

Project Plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

In the lead-up to the opening of the competition on 1 February, we would like to ask participating Wikimedia groups in Africa to tell us how people play in their country. We will select the ideas and use them to talk up and explain the competition for the latter half of January, before it opens.

Once into the entry phase of the competition, we will have materials to showcase the competition through the use of exciting entries in social media feeds. So it makes for an interesting social media feed as well as a platform on which to call for more entries. It is very important that images are accompanied by some contextual text so we can unpack this for our followers. We will also research and target key individuals, organisations and groups who specialise in photography and film by tagging them on social media.

The team will post ad-like posts that can then be boosted. Design for these will either be simply produced by the content manager or created by the project for use in the campaign.

Platforms

The key social media channels are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The predominant use of Facebook and Instagram are deliberate for their ability to hold visual content well.

Timeline

The competition is open for one month (February 2019) so there is a limited window into which we need to squeeze this showcase and call for more entries.

December 2018 : Announce theme, explain the competition – 3 posts
January 2019 : From 14 January – 3 times per week (over three weeks) across all platforms = 36 posts
February 2019 : Post images being submitted 5 days of the week, traffic and submission dependent. This equates to 60 posts for the month of February.

Boosting Strategy

Boosting will be targeted throughout the campaign. High engagement countries like Nigeria, Egypt, Morrocco, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya and South Africa will be prioritised. Posts will be aimed at inspiring dedicated audiences with matching content and general generic calls to entry will also be boosted.

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

Initial engagement around ideas and themes will be conducted via Wikipedians in Africa mailing list, WikiIndaba channel, and Wiki Loves Africa Facebook Group.

Posts by country specific Wiki Loves Africa and Wikimedia Usergroups featuring the contest will be shared by the Wiki Loves Africa main channels.

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

There will be a greater understanding of the contest and the reasons behind it. There will a considerable increase in the number of people engaging with the contest and the entries.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

25% increase in likes/follows on social media channels
Reshares on 10% or more of the posts

Please note: these measures of impact have been altered as per User:Anthere's pertinent points in the endorsement section.

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

The work of the Rabbit in a Hat team
The precontest work done by User:Anthere in the on-Wiki mechanics around the contest
The communications elements for WLA2019 developed by User:Islahaddow prior to the contest
The work being done by the Structured Data teams on Commons
The support and efforts of the Wiki Loves Africa team members and country teams!!
We would love for the Wikimedia Foundation blog to share the news of the contest
We would love for Chapters and other Usergroups to share news of the contest with their members ;-)

Linked applications:

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

$1280 : Origination of content, research, targeting and content and community management
$470 : Facebook/Instagram boosting
$175 : Translation
$25 : bank transfer fees and admin
$1950 : Total

Endorsements

Support. Anthere (talk). But I do have a few suggestions...
- using the December and January posts to boost number of Page likes rather than Post likes. Hence increasing the organic viewership for Feb. Similar mecanisms to use on Instagram, where the account is currently very under used. Create organic audience first.
- I think the regular sharing of posts produced by local teams needs to be systematic and added to the strategy (right now, it is mentioned only as a way to communicate with the local group. No, it is not simply communication with the other groups, it is communicating everywhere that this is a global event. This means that the strategy should include a visit of all partners FB pages and instagram accounts when they have one) maybe twice a week and sharing of the best posts). Maybe the easiest way to achieve this would be to appoint someone French/English/Arabic speaker to be in charge of this entirely (that might require two people for linguistic reasons)
- I think the measures of success are not appropriate because they are related to the entire contest rather than to the activities you are taking in charge as part of this grant. Measures of success for this grant request should be specific to communications. It could be "increase of pages likes", it could be "number of post reshare and likes", it could be mention of the Instagram account in the media and so on. Obviously, the hope is that FB posts and Insta will invite people to do those things such as "reuse of pictures within wikipedia articles" and it would be great if it does ! But this would depend on so many other factors (such as a local team holding an integration editathon) and the specific impact of SM com can not really easily be measured. So I think this part about measures of success and impact needs improvements. Anthere (talk) PS: none of the submitted grant requests may have those figures as "impact measures" because all the grant requests only are about a small part of the contest.

Participants

Volunteer helping the society 197.248.187.14 09:50, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Participants

Volunteer helping the society 197.248.187.14 09:50, 28 February 2019 (UTC)