 Hello, everybody, and welcome to our session. My name is Hannah, and this is my colleague Merle. We both work in the Wikimedia Germany and the Volunteers Engagement Team, and we are really excited to have you in our session today. We are both focusing on recruiting new volunteers. And to do this, we develop onboarding offers and campaigns. And most recently, also via email, which is what we want to tell you more about today. So this session will be 30 minutes. And the first 15 minutes, we will talk about our email campaign, the 30 Days Wikimedia Challenge that we created last year. And we will tell you what we learned and how we are now proceeding with email campaigning. And the remaining 15 minutes will be open for your questions, ideas, and comments. So what did we actually do? We created a 30 Days email campaign where each day subscribers received information about the Wikiverse. And they were step-by-step introduced to editing. People were given a lot of context to Wikimedia and its system projects. And each day with each email, they were asked to complete one small task. We called these tasks Missions. And I will now hand over to Mayala, who will explain in detail. So yeah, one of our team's goals is to recruit new volunteers for Wikimedia. And one of the reasons is that the number of editors in the German language Wikimedia has decreasing for years. We cannot really influence the onboarding on Wikis. So with the mailing campaign, we wanted to reach people before they register in Wikimedia. And the goal is to introduce them slowly to editing, as we also want to be easily approachable throughout the campaign so that people feel that they're not on their own. The campaign is made up around five themes. Here you can see the first three. So we have the introduction to editing, of course, the community and how they work together and the movement. And these topics are mixed throughout the 30 emails. People are presented each day with something different to keep them engaged and which covers different interests and knowledge levels. The most important topic, of course, is editing as we want to attract new volunteers with this campaign. But in short, our onboarding formats be focused only on editing as not to overload people with information. But here we take the chance to explain how the community works together and how they communicate with each other. We want to make it clear how Wikipedia and its sister projects are organized and structured so that newcomers will understand how things work. So here you can see the other two themes. As a fourth pillar, we have the sister projects. They helped you understand that there's more than just Wikipedia, for example, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. These sister projects also provide opportunities for people who want to participate but do not find a good role for themselves in Wikipedia. And last but not least, we have included other bits around free knowledge. For example, we introduce OpenStreetMap and we take time to explain free licenses and hope you can use them as easily as possible, for example. And this way, we want to provide more useful information to users. Even if they do not edit at the end, they learn more about the Wikiverse and topics important to us and the Wikimedia movement. So each email contains a small task that is related to the content of the email which Hannah also teased as a mission. And of course, one of the tasks at the very beginning is for users to create a Wikipedia account. But other tasks later on are, for example, how to write us a message on Wikipedia or leave us a note on the project page so they get used to how to communicate on Wikipedia and also how to edit. Other tasks, for example, where to try to license generate from Wikimedia Deutschland in order to license creative comments pictures correctly or just read a blog post about Sparkle queries from Wikidata. And with these small tasks, we pursue several functions at once. So first, the users are introduced to editing. They gradually build up competence and users have a small sense of achievement each day. And of course, we also make our projects and products better known and throughout these tasks, we can encourage interactions with us and get direct feedback from the users. So we have a short peek into one of the newsletters we send. So here you can see one of these emails. And for this mail, we used an email campaign tool which enabled automatic mailings so you register and you get every day the second and third and the fourth email. And we had a standard design which was the same in all the mailings which you can see here it's wide and there's the universe background. So in the beginning, we introduced the topic and explain it and depending on the length and complexity there's even a second different topic in the email. So and at the end, you will find links to already sent emails which have a similar topic so you can refresh your knowledge if you need to. And of course, there's the mission here, of course, in German, which the small tasks you have to do. And here's how to upload a picture onto comments and divide it into three small steps which you can easily follow. And at the end of the email, you find further links if you want to dive deeper into the topics of the email because it's crucial that an email is not too long and too complex for the user. Okay, let's go to the lessons learned we have. So we send out 30 emails and that was really, really a lot and actually it was far too many we have to say but still the campaign was one of the most successful campaigns we ever did. And we do assume that this was because we were able to paint a big picture of why Wikipedia's great project get involved with. And also we could accompany people very slowly and constantly through the first steps and be there for them via email. What was really surprising for us was that click rates on certain very specialized topics were super high like free licenses, we were thinking, okay, the outsider really interested and the click rates were super, super high and that was quite surprising for us but it gave us a lot of input for new projects. Another lesson learned was that we were able to create a high level of direct interaction with participants via email and on Viki comments through the tasks. And the last bit, which was surprising but also really great, we reach various different audiences. So we targeted this campaign for new editors or people who are not editing yet and actually quite a lot of old Wikipedia's also registered for this campaign. And we got the feedback from several very experienced community members with said that was great, that was interesting and then even learned new stuff. So now I hand back over to Hannah who tells you about the next steps we have on. Yes, so what do we do with all these learnings and what are our next steps concerning email campaigning? Well, as we have seen now, email seems to be a promising channel for attracting new volunteers and the tools of email campaigning enable us to accompany the audiences step-by-step on their path of becoming active and of onboarding. Email campaigns also allow us to track the response of the audience and even adjust the content of the mailings according to their individual learning behavior. And although the 30 Days Wikipedia Challenge was all and all really very successful, still most of the participants neither accomplished all the missions as 30 was really a lot, nor did they register on Wikipedia. So we still have a lot of work to do or there is still much for the audience to learn and also, yeah, for us there are many people that we still want to reach out to. So we, this is why we developed a new format of a newsletter considering all these learnings from the 30 Days Wikipedia Challenge. And now we are running this pilot project which is called Wikipost, which is Wikimail and it's our new newsletter format that goes currently out to approximately 4,500 subscribers who opted in for receiving further information on the Wikimedia projects. We send Wikipost once a week, so less frequently than the campaign, the challenge, and it provides instructions, news and hints for newbies and not yet newbies that help them to learn how to edit Wikipedia step by step and also to get to know the sister projects. So far so good, but still we are facing some challenges and questions and all this. The most challenging thing is that editing in Wikipedia demands a lot of in detail explanation and it is hard to keep emails brief as we wanted to explain in the emails, how to edit, and long emails, however, are risky because we risk to lose the reader's attention. So this is why we are still figuring out which content, in which story is most motivating for people to keep going. And we are also still figuring out when do people actually get involved and when do they step back during a campaign. So all in all there is still a lot of us to find out and to work on, but we think that these campaigns are really good examples and also to a certain degree adaptable for other communities or chapters and this is why for those who are interested we have also translated, this is then here, we have also translated the 30 emails of the Wikipedia challenge into more or less rudimentary English and made them available on Metawiki and the texts and missions here as I said they are created for German speaking Wikipedia, however they are mostly adaptable for other Wikipedia's of course. So yeah, we are now really happy to hear your suggestions, your experiences on this topic and if you have any questions please feel free to ask, we are really excited. So I take a look at the other parts. Do you have a specific mailing list or mailing group that you subscribe people for each emailing campaign? Very very good question. So we had a small list we could start with because as we do our own fundraising which is pretty special to the movement we had if people give us money we normally ask if they are interested in further information and some people agree to it so we could use this list but actually otherwise we had to collect emails and we did collect them in two different ways so we used social media like Twitter and Facebook and used our own channels but we also in the beginning used paid advertising but I guess the biggest group to get into our campaign was we did Centrenotus on German Wikipedia and we targeted German speaking people and via Centrenotus we did really get quite a lot of people who said we are interested. So I would say check out Centrenotus for your things maybe also take a look if you have already contacts as a chapter for example or use your social media Next question is how the success is measured so actually are you able to tell how many of the new members we have retained since the campaign? Yes, we could do that because we have a contractor from the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation can track users on Wikipedia as we as the German chapter cannot and we had tracking links so each link in the newsletter had a tracking link in the end and if a person used this tracking link and registered via this tracking link then via the foundation we could track the person so it's anonymous, we don't know the count name we don't know anything about this person but we know that he created an account and we know he is still editing and yes, that was one of the reasons why we could say that this was actually the most successful campaign we did but also there are different things to measure like we used this mailing provider I don't know MailChimp we are not using MailChimp but something similar and when you use these programs you can go into the statistics and take a look which links were clicked and how many people opened the emails and how many people stopped reading the emails so you have quite a few scales to measure the campaign which was quite interesting and also what I also said as we had those missions like write us an email or leave a note on our project page quite a lot of people did that and that was also success actually for us because we got into direct contact and we saw that people created an account and got into contact with us which was pretty awesome so next another question, oh sorry shall I read out the other question? go ahead do you think on providing this challenge not as a one-time campaign but an option for newcomers at any time instead of the on-wiki first steps somebody can subscribe and start the challenge actually this is how we are dealing with this you can still start the Wikipedia 30 days challenge it is still to be found on our website of Wikimedia and here you can subscribe there you get onto a landing page and then you will receive the emails every each day however we cannot really enter we cannot really set up it on Wikimedia but that is what you probably already know yes I think for us it is good to have different options like some newcomers want to do it on their own and they want just to scroll through the help pages and get maybe in contact with mentees and for other people mailings is a good way to have different options that is pretty good for us so there is another question which device could participants complete the task from could it work with smartphones very very good question most of the missions we had you could do with smartphones but not every mission actually and I think we try to find missions that could be all done by smartphone and I think sometimes we gave an option if you don't if you write it on your desktop device you can do this and if you have your smartphone do that instead so I am still unclear how the original email addresses were gathered and then what platforms so just to make sure I answer it again so we use sentry notice via Wikimedia banner so if you never heard of sentry notice take a look on meter that's a way to get people with a banner on Wikimedia and we use Facebook and Twitter to advertise this campaign and there we used our own channels but also paid ones actually okay how many people subscribed for the 30 day campaign and how many experienced users are needed to get them in the process I think when we did sentry notice banner we had about 10,000 people during this campaign and experienced users actually not many even I don't know if they even needed any so it was quite a lot of work to try these 30 emails and we put a lot of thought into it but these emails itself should help people in the campaign and they sometimes got in contact with us like I said write us an email or write us a message but that was something even with 10,000 people which could be done you know write us short answers so and they thank you for your messages so that was pretty easy to handle and also it was like we from Wikimedia Germany we prepared the emails but of course from time to time we need expert input from the community but they were not involved in a degree that they created these emails so I think Martin my colleague put in the chat a link to meter for sentry notice and he's also going to do a talk on Monday so if you're interested in sentry notice I really advise you to go to that talk because it's a thing to do a sentry notice it's very special but it's also a great option to inform people about what we do okay these are all questions I think anymore feel free we have 10 minutes left so and as Hannah said we posted an English translation on meter which you can find in the description of our session and yeah take a look what you can adapt and what you want to do with it what inspires this work that was the last question actually that's a great question which I had in the beginning and I kicked it out of the presentation we did this campaign while we were in the first lockdown and a third colleague Christina which was also heavily involved in this campaign and I we sat down or actually phoned while we were already in lockdown and we said okay people now have lots of time and people looking for stuff what they can do and actually this people have lots of time that was not true as we probably all know but we had this idea that people want to structure their day and each day maybe have a small challenge and that was what inspired the campaign that we said okay people are in their home they can't get out they are looking for new stuff to do so actually as we used the first lockdown for COVID-19 inspiration and there's another question I like the fact that your resources and challenges are still available it seems to me there is a huge potential that would allow any individual experienced editor to work one-to-one with someone on their own favorite social media platforms and encourage their involvement could you link to the pages you created please Yes we can do that Yeah We will we already posted links on the description of the session and I think we can add more links to the description of the session page later on like also the register site from Wikimedia Deutschland and so on that you can have further looks but right now it's a bit complicated why we are doing the talk Another question by by another participant what were the most engaging activities Meli I think you know best Okay that's very hard to answer actually because like Hannah said we had 30 emails and not everybody did not everybody read all the emails and they they choose emails but they found interesting so if we go to missions I think most people actually created an account but not everybody later on edited like we make a difference between creating an account and editing but the most engaging activities like I said it was really really surprising that people were so interested in free license stuff because we were thinking okay it's a legal thing and most people maybe find it a bit drab or complicated or don't think it's useful for them so that was really really awesome so from Kerry what did the newbies find the harder things to do that's actually something which was not a feedback really given to us in this campaign so we know from other onboarding programs we created that people face challenges often but with this campaign people only wrote to us say it's great or whatever so however I can add something because afterwards we conducted a survey among the participants of the campaign and we asked them what they do wish for us to help them learning Wikipedia and many of them said that for them what do they really need are really these step-by-step instructions of how to do things like how to edit how to put an article and how to upload pictures also on Wikimedia Commons so this was a feedback that we received quite often that they really wish these step-by-steps instructions okay here's another email can you give more examples about activities besides creating an account and sending messages what for example did people on Wikidata so we had I think three mailings regarding Wikidata and as Wikidata actually it's very own onboarding it was very easy task to get them interested for example I think I even mentioned it above we had blog post about funny sparkle queries that people got just what can you actually do with Wikidata and we asked them to do a guided tour to get a look around and actually I can't remember the third mission right now I'm sorry but another question is can you share your own favorite task so actually my favorite task was in the very beginning we answered the question why Wikipedia looks the same as 20 years ago and actually it does not look like it does not look the same even people think it looks the same and we asked people to use the wayback machine so we introduced them to the wayback machine and we also said hey it did change and there's a reason why Wikipedia still looks very old school in a way and we also explained why it's very difficult to change the layout and there are quite a lot of pros for keeping this layout. Yeah I think the tasks that really worked best and this was also what we learned with the new newsletter campaign with the Wikipost is whenever it is embedded in some playful context so if they have to find something out on their own and it's kind of a little game then it works really best for example yeah it is something about finding the milestone article of your last round birthday or something like this things to where they get a task where they have to go and search for something and really get into that stuff I think it does this playful learning that is really that works really well so another question is how did you make sure that they have created an account I tried to answer that before we work together here closely with somebody from the Wikimedia Foundation and why are tracking links we can the Wikimedia Foundation can see if somebody created an account and if this person is also editing because just creating an account is not a good retention but if a person two weeks and four weeks later is still editing that's interesting for us but that's something you really have to have help but as we also said not everybody created an account and not everybody started editing but I think that was also fine for us because we wanted to get people to have a better understanding about Wikimedia and the sister projects and what we got I think we reached that goal actually so there's another question do you have available report statistics about which were the most clicked and visited activities in which were the least yes we do have those because you get those via the email program you use because for every email you get detailed statistics I don't have that site open right now so I would have to I can show you if you can still see this well it's I cannot really show it to you now but you can look it up because we have in our page in our new editors page on Metawiki we have more or less yeah everything you can find the numbers and everything there actually here on this page yes and this page is also linked in the description of the program so is there any kind of recognition or small gift I think our last question but I can give a small answer so we used pictures in the campaign and if Hanna can go back to the to the example at the end you see small robots and those robots were used for I think we had you see 5 these robots and at the end of the email you always said you completed the first mission out of 20 or 30 and you actually completed the 15 for so the robots changed so not a gift we