Learning patterns/How to organize a multilingual campaign

A learning pattern fororganizing a multilingual campaign

Learning Pattern Library

How to organize a multilingual campaign

problemcampaign is an integral part of advocacy and interesting strategy to make a social change, recruit new volunteers and closing content gap in the Wikimedia movement

solutionThis learning pattern will help community members understand how to successfully organize and implement a multilingual campaign.

creator• T Cells

created on07:41, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

status:DRAFT

What problem does this solve?

campaign is an integral part of advocacy and interesting strategy to make a social change, recruit new volunteers and closing content gap in the Wikimedia movement

This pattern is intended to solve the problems associated with organizing and successfully implementing a multilingual campaign. Generally, campaigns requires a significant amount of time for planning, and resources but more time and resources are required for organizing a multilingual campaign. Organizing a multilingual campaign especially a campaign that involves direct editing of live articles could be very tricky but good implementation strategy could be helpful in making it a success.

What is the solution?

Note: You may skip this learning pattern if you have successfully organize and implemented a multilingual campaign but you may still find some of the techniques describe in this pattern useful.

Refining your idea

• Most ideas need to be refined and a great deal of effort is usually required in refining a new idea. The first step is to discuss the idea with a more experienced person(s). Maybe with someone who has experienced in organizing a similar campaign. This could help in shaping your original ideas into something more useful and impactful
• Share your idea with other volunteers who might share your goals and provide support during the planning
• Form an organizing team and ensure that the team is multilingual. That is, members should be selected from different language community. You may consider selecting people from large languages community as members and your team should be gender-balanced.
• Assign positions for members of the team based on their language, experienced and competency. The position may range from coordinators to community liaisons. You may also want to appoint a regional or language ambassador to support small languages and underrepresented communities.
• It's important to determine the theme of your campaign or the focus area. For example, your campaign may primarily focus on creating new articles about festivals and the campaign goals and mission statement should clearly state this. You may also want the various language community to decide a topic area that is most important to them. Make sure the theme is broad enough to allow each language communities decides what interest them.
• Carefully select your theme and ensure that you do not select a theme that has been selected by another person or group. Make sure you select a theme that global community of participants would find interesting
• You may want to decide on the best time to run your campaign. Make sure it does not happen simultaneously with another campaign or a similar campaign. Allow your campaign to run simultaneously with a similar campaign would result in a lot of confusion that may impact on your campaign.
• Tracking of metrics is important. You need to identify the best tool for tracking your campaign metrics.

Run a pilot

Running a pilot is an essential step in implementing your campaign. Multilingual campaign could be problematic if not well-implemented. Once you finalize or idea and theme. It's important to run a pilot.

Things to consider in running your pilot

Before the campaign

• Design a colorful logo for the campaign
• Build your campaign around Wikimedia affiliates. They would be responsible for running the campaign locally in their respective community. This has been established as an effective way to run campaigns
• Keep the number of languages small. Two or three languages are generally recommended. You may not run your campaign in more than three languages for a start. This would enable you to easily manage any problem that result during the campaign implementation.
• Set up the campaign page on Meta-Wiki since it's a multilingual project if your campaign is focusing on adding contents to Wikipedia articles
• Set up the campaign page on Wikimedia Commons if your campaign is focusing on adding contents to Wikimedia Commons
• Your campaign page should includes the following:

1. Deatailed information about the campaign
2. Step-by-step on how to participate
3. Detailed campaign rules
4. Campaign timeline
5. Section where participating communities could list their community with contact details
6. Section for organizing team to support communication and information sharing with the team.
7. Section for FAQ, resources and results

• Prepare the project page for translation and invite translators to help with translation. This process should start at least 3 weeks before the campaign.
• Prepare the campaign for the Central Notice banner.
• The central banner text should be interesting and catchy
• Invite translators to help with translating the central notice banner text. This process should start at least 2 weeks before the campaign
• Once the translations are ready a Central Notice Admin will approve it and schedule it for display during the campaign
• Mailing list and telegram group for communication among participants and organizing team.
• Design your campaign timeline at least 2 months before your campaign and share it with the participating or targeted affiliates communities
• Design your prizes structure but do not offer cash prizes to winners. It could range from postcard or souvenirs to gift vouchers (such as Amazon gift card). You may apply for WMF grant to support the prizes.
• Determine the best duration for your campaign. Generally, 3 - 4 weeks is sufficient but could be more, depending on the number of participating communities
• Invite the participating communities via their respective designated contacts or contact person. This could be found on the affiliates meta page
• Design a guide on how they could organize the campaign in their community and share it with them at least 6 weeks before the campaign.
• Create a social media handles for your campaign. It should be a single handle across multiple social media networks Share this handles with the participating communities of the campaign.
• Keep promoting the campaign on social media with various promotion materials.
• Share the tracking tools with participating communities at least two weeks before the campaign and also the documentation on how how use it. See example Guide on how to use WPWP Campaign Hashtags
• Encourage local organizers to organize a training or series of training for participants from their community
• Depending on the availability of funding, local organizers may organize one or more events to support the campaigns

During the campaign

• Encourage local organizing team to support with monitoring the campaign in their various communities
• Keep posting about the campaign on social media. Share metrics with audience on social media
• Encourage local organizing team to post about the campaign on their social media handles
• Monitor the campaign progress and share the progress with the community
• Promptly respond to questions and query from participants and community or assign someone from the team to monitor campaign mailing lists and talk page

After the campaign

• Review the contributions and help with cleanup
• Encourage local organizers to help with cleanup
• Set up the jury team and provide the team with the database of the contributions
• Set up the guidelines for judging and share it with the jury
• Evaluate the campaign
• If your campaign is a grant funded campaign, consider writting the report and submit it to your funder with documentation of expenses with original receipts, bills, invoices etc.
• You may consider writing a blog post about the campaign, so that the international community can learn from your experiences.
• Finally, thank all those who've helped you in organizing the project, and if possible write thank you letters, customized post cards etc.

Learning and evaluation of your pilot

The primary purpose of running a pilot is to learn from the results. The results of the pilot would provide the following insights:

• Interest of the community
• Best timeline for your campaign
• What did not work well and what you should do better or differently
• What worked well and what can be improved.

If the result of your pilot is poor, you may try to run it again, this time reduce the number of languages and use the lesson learnt to improve it. If it fails again, stop the campaign, redesign it, change its scope and possibly the theme.

• Try to understand why it failed by conducting a research on the cause of the failure. You may conduct a survey to determine what might interest the community, their priority goals, and collect input on what they think might work well. For example see #WPWPCampaign Evaluation Report 2020

Things to consider

Main campaign

If your pilot is successful, then it's time you organize your main campaign in several languages community. Follow the same steps as highlighted in the pilots above and use the learning in your pilot to improve the main campaign.

• Set up the main campaign page and the core organizing team
• Consider inviting experienced community members to join your team and at least one WMF staff to serve as advisor for the campaign

When to use

This learning pattern will not only useful be useful for "organizing a multilingual campaign", but also for other online campaigns in general.

See also

Learning patterns/Organizing "Wiki Loves" campaigns

Related patterns

Learning patterns/Organizing "Wiki Loves" campaigns

External links

• Inspiring and thought-provoking panel discussion from Wikimania 2021: English as a lingua franca of the Wikimedia movement: how do we ensure people's inclusion?
  • Session description
  • Detailed notes
  • YouTube recording