Grants:Project/Rapid/WMHKG/Community Relaunch Project 2021-22

statusfunded

Rapid Grants

WMHKG/Community Relaunch Project 2021-22

To relaunch, re-engage and attract new members for the local community by hosting regular meetups, organising contest and digital marketing.

targetzhwp, enwp, yuewp, commons

start date1 December

end date31 October

budget (local currency)HKD 33,182 (HKD 31,602 net budget + 5% contingency)

budget (USD)USD 4,258

grant typeIndividual

non-profit statusNo

grantee• Michael (WMHKG)

contact(s)• michael_t_tseoutlook.com• dasze.wikiicloud.com

organization (if applicable)• Wikimedia Community User Group Hong Kong

website (if applicable)• Meta page

friendly space expectations

ucc

privacystatement

Review your report

Project Goal

Briefly explain what are you trying to accomplish with this project, or what do you expect will change as a result of this grant. Example goals include, "recruit new editors", "add high quality content", or "train existing editors on a specific skill".

We aim to relaunch, re-engage and attract new members for the local community by hosting regular meetups, organising contest and piloting a targeted digital marketing for outreach. This is phase 1 of the HK User Group's longer term vision to increase awareness of the Wikimedia Movement locally and nurture an engaged community of Wikimedians in Hong Kong.

Project Plan

Project 1: Meetups

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

We are going to host bi-monthly meetups (i.e. once ever 2 months) from December 2021 onwards. They will be held over weekend afternoons in comfortable venues such as cafes or co-working spaces which are easily accessible via public transport with good WIFI connection. Meetups will start with a short lightning talk (on trending themes and topics) about the Wikimedia movement. Then, participants can go on editing or socialise with each other. Experienced editors can act as a help desk for newbies attending the meetups.

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

2-3 weeks before each meetup, we will advertise the meetup by on-wiki (e.g. Usergroup page) and off-wiki channels (e.g. social media, university noticeboards etc). The venue partner may also help to promote the events. Everyone, including veterans and newbies are welcome to attend.

Our initial hypothesis is that the majority of readers accessing Wikipedia locally is between 18 and 24 years old, predominantly male and are accessing wikipedia for intrinsic learning. This is in line with the Demographics and Wikipedia use cases study conducted in Taiwan. Hence, for a start, our promotional activities will target young persons and will look to focus on interest groups with more gender diversity in a later phase.

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

At the end of the project, we will have held 6 meetups. For meetup participants who are not yet User Group members, we will invite them to join it and stay engaged. As this grant will fund a series of engagement activities over time, the interaction and follow-up from the organisers and hosts will be high-touch. This means we will be able to track the level of interest and participation of newbies over time and adjust our approach accordingly.

Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

The project involves 6 offline meetups. The expected group size of each meetup is about 10-15 persons. We will follow the local social distancing regulations. Participants are also expected to register early for contact tracing (i.e. no walk-in).

Risk Assessment

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

1. 60-90 total participants (i.e. 10-15 participants/ session)
2. 20-40 unique participants in the entire funding period (i.e. we envision 50% participants to be newcomers and 50% to be experienced Wikipedians
3. Retention rate of 25% (i.e. For every 4 new people who join, 1 person will return to participate in another session)

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

• Michael will be the person in charge of the project.
• Directors and the social media team will work for documenting and promoting the events.
• Venue partner: Desk-one (Confirmed for first edition, may change depending on initial feedback)

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

• Venue rental: HK$7,200 (HK$1,200/3 hours block × 6 meetups)
• Refreshments: HK$5,400 (HK$60/head×15×6)
• Subtotal: HK$12,600 (US$1,617)

Project 2: Wiki Loves Earth Hong Kong 2022

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

We plans to organise the first-ever local edition of Wiki Loves Earth photo contest in May 2022. The event will span about 3 months from preparation to prize distribution. The timeline is as follows:

• February - March 2022: Local team formation
• April 2022: Preparation and contest promotion
• May 2022: Receiving photo entries
• Early June 2022: Jury scoring and announcing winners
• Mid-late June 2022: Prize distribution

However, we plan to host the contest with internal resources only, i.e. no external jury, as we have no experience in running similar contests yet. We may invite external jury next time if the contest is proven successful.

We may reach out to experienced campaign community organisers in the ESEAP region for cross learning (e.g. in areas of event planning and implementation workflow so we don't have to re-invent the wheel.) and also refer to available online resources (e.g. Wikilovesearth/ organise)

The choice of Wiki Loves Earth is most suitable now as we observe an increase interest with being outdoors after months of COVID-19 social and travel restrictions in Hong Kong.

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

We will utilise multiple promotion strategies to advertise the event:

• On-wiki promotion (CentralBanner, Noticeboards, Mass messages)
• Digital advertising (mainly Facebook and Instagram)
• Offline advertising (we will design, print and post posters in small quantities in places like outdoor supplies stores, University interest groups etc)

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

At the end of the project, we will have large quantities (hundreds) of quality photos (that are captioned and tagged) related to Hong Kong's nature available on Wikimedia Commons. The off-wiki focused promotion strategy will hopefully attract more people to contribute after the contest with positive spillover to regular meet up (i.e. Project 1). We will honour the participants by giving out prizes and certificates to the top 15 submissions.

Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

This is a completely online project. We don't plan to host meet-ups or photowalks for the contest. If local pandemic situation allows, we may give out physical prizes and certificates in person. It will follow the procedures of meet-ups and the risk assessment for meet-ups follows.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

We plan to use the Wikiloves tool forge to track the success of the campaign. This includes tracking uploads, images used, uploads etc. Our target is:

1. 100 participants
2. 400 new photo uploaded to Commons.

Note: To ensure that photos are of good quality, tagged and captioned well, we plan to also provide guidelines on this as part of the eligibility and submission process

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

• We will form a local team to distribute the workload.
• Several members of the User Group are familiar with photography. We will invite them to work as internal jury. As this is the first time we are hosting a photo contest, we don't plan to incorporate external jury for the contest.

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

• Prizes: HK$7,500 (Outdoor supplies store gift cards)
• Postage: HK$200 (For distributing prizes and physical certificates)
• Printing: HK$300 (For promotional material and physical certificates)
• Social media advertising: HK$2,000
• Subtotal: HK$10,000 (US$1,286)

Project 3: Digital marketing campiagn

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

WMHKG has severely underused its social media capacity. While we have created a Facebook page in late 2018, the page was only sparingly used as a noticeboard for our events. It has only about 192 followers and posts have very little reach. We have decided to completely remodel our social media presence. We have created a new Instagram profile, Telegram public channel and relaunched the existing Facebook page. We now post regularly with content closely focused on recent trends. However, we will need to invest in social media advertising before a "critial mass" of followers is reached, and the social media channels can sustain itself without advertising.

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

This is a digital advertising project meant to expand external reach on Facebook and Instagram. Our observation is that these are the two social media tools that are widely used by youths (and young working adults) in Hong Kong, our target group.

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

At the end of the project, we will have a significantly stronger social media presence. The organic reach should be large enough that social media advertising will be much less needed.

Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

Not applicable.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

• Our social media channels (Facebook, Instagram) should have a total of 1,000 - 3,000 followers at the end of the project.

(Baseline: In October 2021, our Facebook page had 192 followers. Our Instagram profile was created in late October.)

• We also plan to document our learnings from our social media strategy (an example) at the end of the project for further sharing with affiliates in the region.

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

• We will form a social media team and collectively spend 2-3 hours per week to curate content.

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

• Social media advertising: HK$4,000 (on Facebook and Instagram)
• Hiring external designer: HK$2,400 (3 graphic designs, HK$800 per piece)
• Subtotal: HK$6,400 (US$821)

Other expenses

We also plan to use the Rapid Fund request to improve our internal collaborative capacity. We will subscribe to Google Workspace which will host our new official email, website and shared online workspace.

Expenses

• Google Workspace subscription: US$324 (US$5.40/month/user×6 users×10 months)
• Domain name: US$10
• Subtotal: US$334 (HK$2,602)