Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for WHYY's Fresh Air with Terry Gross Archives

Questions about your request

Dear WHYYinc,

Thank you for submitting this proposal. This sounds like an exciting opportunity for collaboration between Wikipedians and Fresh Air.

Before we make a funding decision about this proposal, can you speak to the following questions?

• At present, there appear to be only three participants signed up for this event. In the Impact section of your proposal, we'd like to ask you to set a numeric target for the number of participants you are aiming to draw for this event.
• Many venues are willing to donate the use of their space for editathons for Wikipedia, we wanted to inquire whether you have made any inquiries along these lines? We recognize this isn't always possible, so we are happy to fund the cost of the venue as requested, if needed.

We can finalize a decision about this request within a couple of days of receiving your response.

Thanks,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

Request funded

Dear WHYYinc,

Thank you for revising your proposal to answer the questions I posted above. We appreciate the clarity that the venue will be in kind and we are happy to pay for the costs of the associated support services. Your target of 50 people is a great goal for this event.

We are approving this request in the amount of $1,300, with the following recommendations:

• $700 to cover food and beverage costs for 50 participants works out to $14 per person. Typically, we see per person costs for snacks and drinks at editathons averaging around $7 per person. We're going ahead with approval despite some reservations about your per-person costs because we want to allow you sufficient time to execute your event plan for October 6. To the extent possible given your constraints, however, we'd appreciate your efforts to come in under budget in this category.
• Typically, editathons last at least three hours. This allows time for an experienced Wikipedian to train participants in the basics of editing, time for breaks, and time for the participants to settle in to a new context and make meaningful edits, which tends to be a slow-paced activity. If your schedule allows for it, you may wish to consider extending your editathon for longer than 90 minutes.
• We encourage you to think about potential follow-up events to sustain the engagement of participants in this event. We see much greater success in creating self-motivated volunteers when there is series of multiple events to give participants a chance to cement new skills. If it is unlikely that you can host follow-up events, you can alternatively set up opportunities for online support in the wake of the event. You may wish to work with your local Wikipedian volunteers to see if they would be willing to respond to questions in an online forum that your event participants can access.
• We ask that you track Global Metrics during your grant. Please review the Global Metrics information, Learning Patterns, and associated tools here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_%26_Evaluation/Global_metrics

Please let us know if you have any questions. Ms. Janice Tud will be in touch with more information and next steps.

Thank you again for your interest in hosting this event! We're glad to support this partnership.

Also, congratulations to Terry Gross for receiving the National Humanities Medal from President Obama!

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 26 September 2016 (UTC)