Grants:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in the United States/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2018-19 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in the United States.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

We met our ultimate goal of hosting another successful Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States. We beat our goals for participant counts and number of uploads.

We did not meet was the number of uploaded photos being used on Wikimedia projects, but we are still pleased with the outcome and that number may continue to grow over time.

Two of our goals, which was to have 15 featured photos and at least 150 quality photos, were not pursued due to time constraints. As both featured and quality images are recognized as a result of community nomination and consensus, the success of these goals is dependent on volunteers going through and nominating acceptable photos - which is something we hope to work on throughout the rest of the year.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Important Links

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1,400 participants	1,982	We're thrilled to have beaten our expectations, as well as the number of participants from the previous year (1,413). Of all participating nations, we had the second-highest number of participants (first being India at 2,304). ~91% of users registered after the start of the competition, which continues our trend of being an avenue to onboard new contributors primarily through the geonotice.
10,000 uploads	10,471	We're happy to have met our expectation, as well as beating the number of uploads from the previous year (8,050).
1,500 photos used on Wikimedia projects	912 (9%)	While we are under our goal, we are still happy to see a good number and percentage of uploads being used on projects.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?
- We exceeded our expectations in uploads and participants, and we are thrilled to see our contest continue to maintain interest and growth.
- Over 90% of participants were first-time contributors to Wikimedia, so it is great to see our contest continue to be an avenue for people to on-board to the project.
- We improved participants' ability to discover sites through continuing to expand our state-level guides, as well as onboarding onto the new Wiki Loves Monuments Map.
- Our judging process, which we developed last year, worked well once again; we utilized Montage as well as had our pre-judging process to filter out ineligible photos to try to minimize the number of photos each of our judges would have to review.
- We on-boarded a new co-organizer, Laura, who is a great addition to the team. She primarily helped expand our state- and local-level guides for participants.
What did not work so well?
- Our U.S. constant uniquely allows participants to upload photos of sites recognized by non-federal authorities (such as state and local historical societies, non-profit organizations dedicated to recognizing historical sites, etc.). While this broadens our scope, we unfortunately do not have easy ways for participants to find non-federal locations due to the decentralization of all that data.
- While we have improved our judging process, there is still plenty of improvement to make to make the number of photos each judge has to review more manageable. This can include a better pre-judging process, as well as on-boarding more judges.
What would you do differently next time?
- We hope to greatly improve our state-level guides throughout the year to make site discovery easier for participants.
- We would like to begin uploading state-level site data (particularly coordinates) to Wikidata to allow for integration with Wiki Loves Monuments Map.
- We would like to continue improving our homepage to make the learning and uploading process as easy as possible for participants.
- We should find more jury members earlier, and try to do our pre-jury filtering earlier to allow for a more thorough and quick filtering process.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Item	Budgeted Cost	Actual Spend	Notes
1st Prize	$500	$500	Amazon giftcard
2nd Prize	$350	$350	Amazon giftcard
3rd Prize	$200	$0	Winner's contact information not available, never claimed
4th-10th Prizes	$350	$200	$50 each, some winners' contact information not available and never claimed.
Facebook advertising	$40	$40	Video ad reaching 3,476 people, with 851 10-second video views ($0.05 per), 10 shares, and 32 clicks of the link in the video description.
Twitter advertising	$25	$25
Certificate printing	$15	$12.57	10 certificates on high-quality paper sent to top-ten placers.
Custom shirts for judges and winners	$350	$349.13	35 custom shirts (~$8/each) from Blue Cotton, which will go to our jury (estimated up to 25) and top-ten winners after the end of the contest. T-shirts provide a nice incentive and thank-you for our jury and winners. T-shirts will be made to order, so we won't be ordering any more than we need.
Poly mailers for shirts	$10	$21.63	Poly mailers to send shirts to jury and winners
Postage	$120	$60.12	Estimated $3 per shirt + $1 per certificate
Total:	$1,960	$1,558.45

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

We have $401.55 remaining. The grantee, SuperHamster, would like to re-allocate these funds for Wiki Love Monuments 2019 in the United States.

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 401.55 USD were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/SuperHamster/Wiki Loves Monuments 2019 in the United States.

Acknowledgements

A thank you to my co-organizers, Nikikana and Laura Soito, for helping put on this event and make it a reality every year.
A thank you to all the jury members who spend hours reviewing photos to determine our winners.
A thank you to the international WLM team and the Wikimedia Foundation for continuing to support the event.
A thank you to Commons editors who help filter, categorize, and clean up all the uploads, and all Wikimedia editors who help utilize the photos.
And a thank you to all participants!

The winners of the U.S. contest can be viewed here.