Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Growing our community - one volunteer, campaign, program at the time

Regional Committee feedback and questions

@Strainu and Klaul: The committee has completed an initial review of the proposal, and has some initial feedback and questions to share, which I have summarized below:

• Thanks for providing the communication strategy document that began its development last year. What sort of work or tasks are left to do to complete a finalized communications strategy? Do you expect to complete this work this year and implement the strategy this year?
• It's great to hear that some of the newer campaigns your organization has led, like WikiMărțisor, are growing, and that you seek to organize more in-person events for the events with support from potential partners!
• We appreciate seeing that you will be endeavoring to support the celebration of Wikimedia editors during the Week of the Volunteers this year, and we agree that this kind of recognition is important.
• One part of feedback offered last year, when you proposed WMROMD's first grant with a full annual plan of activities, was the following:

  Your program plan also covers a fairly large range of activities given the size of your organization, including trainings, several major campaigns, pilots for new activities with aligned partners, among other events. While this initial scope presents a lot of exciting opportunities, please be careful around your capacity as you will also be actively recruiting volunteers at the same time. It will be important to take time to prioritize some of these activities and campaigns over others if it is too challenging to do it all.

In terms of your overall capacity, was it challenging to balance all of these activities? Did your experiences with focusing on these different priorities in the past year inform the current proposal in any particular way?

• In general, can you provide some context around how your organization determines what activities and programs to run in your communities? Are there opportunities for community members to participate or support decisionmaking around these prioities?
• Regarding your expenses for personnel in the budget, can you explain how you have generally determined staff costs for paid roles, including contractors? One point of clarity needed in our initial review was that the manager role looks to be about 0.2 FTE. You also report that you have a total of 0.4 FTE that includes contractors.

We request your response on this feedback by Monday, May 20th, which will support us to finalize a funding decision on the proposal. Please let us know if you have any questions or needs for clarity on the feedback. On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments.

• Thanks for providing the communication strategy document that began its development last year. What sort of work or tasks are left to do to complete a finalized communications strategy? Do you expect to complete this work this year and implement the strategy this year?

The Communication Strategy will be finished by the end of the current grant and its implementation is set to start in September 2024, for a period of 2 years.

• It's great to hear that some of the newer campaigns your organization has led, like WikiMărțisor, are growing, and that you seek to organize more in-person events for the events with support from potential partners!

We are excited about this too!

• We appreciate seeing that you will be endeavoring to support the celebration of Wikimedia editors during the Week of the Volunteers this year, and we agree that this kind of recognition is important.

This is a work in progress. We cannot say that our results were where we hoped but we will continue on this path.

• One part of feedback offered last year, when you proposed WMROMD's first grant with a full annual plan of activities, was the following: Your program plan also covers a fairly large range of activities given the size of your organization, including trainings, several major campaigns, pilots for new activities with aligned partners, among other events. While this initial scope presents a lot of exciting opportunities, please be careful around your capacity as you will also be actively recruiting volunteers at the same time. It will be important to take time to prioritize some of these activities and campaigns over others if it is too challenging to do it all.
• In terms of your overall capacity, was it challenging to balance all of these activities? Did your experiences with focusing on these different priorities in the past year inform the current proposal in any particular way?

Balancing multiple campaigns proved to be a challenge only earlier this year when we had multiple campaigns at the same time. When we wrote the proposal we continued our strategy to make sure that for each campaign we have a coordinator and a second person interested in it. The change that we see happening is that more people from outside the UG contribute to campaigns by organizing or participating in them. Since last year we have a new UG member and another wikipedia editor is now a constant supporter of our group work. That makes us hopeful that more people will engage in helping out with our coming campaigns.

• In general, can you provide some context around how your organization determines what activities and programs to run in your communities? Are there opportunities for community members to participate or support decision making around these priorities?

We discuss our plans in our open monthly online meetings and ask for suggestions on Cafenea or in our meetings. Campaigns like #EveryBookItsReader and Concursul de scriere were suggested by non-UG members and were supported through the grants.

• Regarding your expenses for personnel in the budget, can you explain how you have generally determined staff costs for paid roles, including contractors? One point of clarity needed in our initial review was that the manager role looks to be about 0.2 FTE. You also report that you have a total of 0.4 FTE that includes contractors.

Staff costs are a relatively new expense for our UG, as before we had only contractors. This increased the overall costs as we are paying taxes for staff now. On one hand we are trying to bring staff in as this will help with constant work being done for the community in our project, on the other hand costs related to that are bigger than planned and paying qualified people gets to be quite expensive. Paying contractors is a solution but it also consumes time and does not contribute to sustainable solutions for the community. So we put in 0.2FTE for the manager and estimated that the other costs with contactors would be equivalent to another 0.2FTA budget wise. Hence the 0.4FTA.

Please see below our answers. Do let us know if you have any additional questions.

cc @Strainu Klaul (talk) 14:32, 14 May 2024 (UTC)