Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Hausa Wikimedians User Group Annual Plan 2024

Proposal Feedback and Invite for Response

Thank you for submitting your application. After the review process please find the feedback - comments and questions below for your response;

• Seeing that you are currently implementing your first annual grant - we are kindly requesting for a 2-3 paragraphs speaking to the progress you have had so far in your work and especially with the support of the general support fund. Is there a place we can see how you ended up adjusting the approved budget to align with the funded amount.
• We are keen to learn on your volunteer retention strategy. Do you collect feedback from volunteers to assess the impact of your work? If yes, what is the approach you use.
• Please provide some more information on your partnerships plan and especially with tertiary institutions.
• We were intrigued by the capacity building plan and wondered given the capacity of the team if the frequency was ambitious and especially when we think about all the aspects to implementing an impactful training from needs assessment, curriculum development to evaluation. Please share your thinking as we thought an yearly basis could serve better.
• As you plan to grow some of your programs, please share with us your approach in validating that indeed they work as they are or with adjustmnents that then informs your decision for growth.

We highly recommend you get in touch with the regional program officer to support you in understanding the questions raised or if you find it useful to meet with the committee as well, please let them know and they can organize a conversation meeting.

Thank you, and we look forward to receiving your responses to support us in the next steps. On behalf of the MEA Regional Committee and Staff - VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 12:21, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello @VThamaini (WMF); Thank you for the feedback and questions. Here's our response (in the order of the questions):

• We have shared a preliminary activities report for our General Support Fund project which can be seen here: Hausa Wikimedians User Group/Report 2023. More specifically, we have provided information about adjustments made to align with the approved amount in this section: Hausa Wikimedians User Group/Report 2023 § Programs and budget adjustments.
• Yes we do. We have so far sent two surveys to gather feedback from volunteers. These surveys are not solely for measuring retention, as they include questions around volunteer satisfaction/experience with our programs and their overall engagement, but we can analyze retention from the feedback. We also employee one-on-one check-ins with volunteers as almost the majority of our members are in one of our WhatsApp groups. This personal approach does not scale for everybody but it does provide for more in-depth discussions about individual experiences, challenges, and in understanding where the editor readily needs help or why they no longer edit. Through our Volunteer Data Support program, we also collect some information about editor editing statistics through available public stats which also gives some level of information that gives retention data. The data collected from the different approaches will be explained in more detail in our project report.
• In our partnership project, we planned to partner with two institutions and possibly create student fan clubs to sustain Wikimedia activities at the schools after our programs. We have already made contacts and also organized introduction programs at two institutions, Umaru Musa Yar'adua University and Kaduna State University. For the former, an invitation was extended to us to also organize a workshop for their faculty after the collaborative project we did for undergraduates, however we are not currently capable of organizing that this year. We have got full support of the schools management and discussed plans for establishing fan clubs plans. However, for the fan clubs to be functional, we need to be able to provide some level of financial support to kick off initial activities before the clubs mature or be able to source for funding from Wikimedia or other appropriate sources.
• In the implementation of our projects (before General Support Fund) one of the problems we retrospectively understood impeded growth (in terms of expert editors as opposed to number of editors) in our community was overfocus on new editors and getting large number of account registrations who'd end up doing a pocket of editing from these accounts but not supported enough to become experts through progressive learning, because we shift attention to set of another new users as the next event comes up (which was generally a distinct event in the defunct Rapid grant system). This created a cohort of editors who are barely able to edit and fumble at almost every other slightly technical thing like using intricate templates, handling media files, prose rewriting and referencing. This cohort formed a large part of our usergroup members. (There is an exception for a small subset of users who'd later become experienced through self-learning and trial and error, but these are few, very few in fact and it took longer without guidance). When we started this project we figured we need to take a look back to address the issue and reverse the trend.

That's why at the planning for 2023 project, we decided to pay the needed attention to those subset of editors. We started by having advanced editing lessons with select editors a week prior to any major program we organize (the next one is slated for some days from now which is November 18th, before the main open program on November 25th). This is necessary, because in our regular events we get a pool of participants with wide-ranging experience from complete novice to veteran editors and the novices are far in number which leads to our programs mostly catering for them (basics of editing and creating account). Due to the time needed to assimilate the concepts, there's hardly any time remaining to even talk about Wikidata and Commons; and we kept going in cycle repeating basic Wikipedia introduction in the following program because there are even more new people. With the approach we chose, we have seen significant improvement as more and more people are understanding editing at a deeper level and continue to participate in our programs up to today and even provide support to others themselves.

However, as we have not fully developed the idea of the special senior editors program as at the time of submitting the current General Support Fund application, we cannot implement the idea we have in full due to resources limitations and timing. The current approach is using minimal resources in informal settings which is not very convenient. As we have seen the impact and the potential of this strategy we have decided to expand it more broadly in this application. We are confident, we currently have the team capacity to execute this. Some of the editors being trained under this program have already been given the opportunity to facilitate other programs or guide a subset of new editors (with little support) and we were satisfied with the result. We have also expanded our core team, including with a female editor for the first time and also constituted an event support team with competent editors capable of replacing key team members as the need arises. Our core team alone has combined wiki editing experience of over 20 years mostly on Hausa and English Wikipedias.

• Our approach to validating effectiveness is by setting clear objectives (and measurable metrics) for each program and also monitoring the progress continuously to allow space for changes where necessary while the program is being implemented. We also consider piloting new programs or approaches on a smaller scale, like we're doing with the Volunteer Data Support program. This gives us room to identify potential challenges and remedy them more easily before scaling up, or make necessary adjustments while the program is ongoing. In this application, we are specifically expanding our programs with new Community development micro grants (which was introduced last year, but removed as advised) and also expanding the scope and frequency of our special capacity building training. These changes were all informed by success and experiences of the current work and the need for expanding them as our community grows and our challenges evolve. We use a combination of quantitative data and descriptive information (for instance, the state of things when we started and when the program concludes) to get a comprehensive understanding of a program's impact and develop an impact report based on that.

Thank you and apologies for the delayed response. (On behalf of the Hausa Wikimedians User Group) – Ammarpad (talk) 19:56, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

General Support Funding Approved at USD 50,000

Dear Hausa Wikimedians User Group,

Thank you for submitting your application seeking General Support Funds - Wikimedia Community Fund. The MEA Regional Committee and Staff have thoroughly reviewed, discussed and deliberated upon your application and made the decision to fund you at USD 50,000 for the grant period of 1st January 2024 to 31st December 2024.

Here are a few points to note; We found your programming to remain solid and look forward to further consolidation of work. Please include the updated - adjusted budget in the budget you had shared initially. We continue to see an opportunity to review your retention strategies to support contributor metrics better.

We hope to continue having regular conversations over the course of your grant implementation. Do set up a regular schedule to connect with your MEA Programme Officer based on your needs.

The reporting requirements for the grant will shared in your grant agreement and on Fluxx. All reports are to be completed and submitted via Fluxx.

Once again, Congratulations! We thank you for your participation in the grant application process and hope to continue to journey with you as you embark on a new year of project implementation.--Aristidek5maya (talk) 14:24, 15 December 2023 (UTC)