 Hi everybody. Thank you that you joined our today's session with quite a long title, but we hope that the content will be light and funny. So let me share my screen. So we would like to talk more about how to promote your activities and why having a public relation and fundraising specialists make sense. So on the first place, we are to tell you what to do. My name is Clara Kova. I'm an executive director of the Canadian Czech Republic. Since March 2018. And most of today's session will be held by my colleague, Natalia or Talej Skavalova. She's our fundraiser and PR specialist in the Canadian Czech Republic since January on the PR position and since September 2021 on fundraising positions as well. So just show you a broader picture who what is how big is the Canadian Czech Republic. We are Czech chapter, of course, till 2006. But the stuff the chapter hired in 2017 between the years 2018 and now we grows from four people to 10 people. And within the team, even though still most of the team has just like part time jobs. Natalia didn't start on the from the stretch. She could continue the work that was started by our two colleagues who were just for a few hours a week. They were external contractors and they started made a more concrete fundraising and PR PR work in the Canadian Czech Republic. And what's important that they was able to finish the preparation phase, which I'm going to mentioned slightly later. Well, we and why and what this bring this shift from external to internal fundraising in PR that is covered by by Talej. That's the topic of today's session. I will start with lessons learned, but I think it's good to be prepared for several things on the beginning. The preparation phase, I mentioned takes several months. Getting money to get the money. It's a relative of an iceberg. And it takes time to get it. What's essential to have or to create during the preparation phase. I think it's stakeholder stakeholder analysis, just to to describe and set your target groups. You have around and how to reach them because these, this is your essential essential circles. These are your essential circles that you can reach on the first place and you should know how they look like and how you can contact them the best. So you said target groups and you said tools. Next thing. What I would suggest to prepare its general fundraising and PR strategy. What we need to find out is how we support our three main program areas, the best. And we choose this. We have three main program groups, educational programs, community programs and partnership programs. And as educational programs are the best described to the general public. We choose this for the direct mentoring. Community programs are the best to support it by different type of grants. This is what we choose for for them and partnership programs so the partnership with public institutions. This is the best target for CSR or corporate donations. So this is in general our main PR and fundraising strategy. What was essential to prepare is an annual fundraising and PR strategy. It doesn't need to be something really complicated, but you supposed to know what, when, how, how many and how much you expected to bring. My advice is keep it light. What was our, what was our vision as well was that we wanted to create a fresh image for WMCZ. So here is what we wanted to share with you. It has been almost a year since we decided to hire fundraiser and PR specialist in house. She works for 20 hours a week and she helps us to promote our activities better and she started our fundraising. So what we want to share with you is what did we expect. How is the outcome of this and specific examples of our campaigns and content. Hello everybody. Thanks for being here with us. The first thing I want to start with is just a basic overview of what does a fundraiser and a PR specialist do. In other words, what I do for Wikimedia Czech Republic, as you can see, I do stuff at our public events like presenting and putting bounds on windows. Seriously, I take the overall presentation to the public and marketing under my wings. I work part time, which means I cannot do everything, but I make sure it works with our team members. We have 10 members of Wikimedia Czech Republic team. So I cooperate with the rest of the team. I promote activities and the idea of free knowledge on social media blog website and other channels. I create fundraising campaigns and take continuous care of our donors and supporters. I come up with creative ideas and I am very lucky that our ED Clara mostly accepts them and does not shut them down. I would like to start with a little bit about our first ever fundraising campaign, which took part, which took place last Christmas. And it was pretty successful as it was the first one we chose, we chose our Seniors' Rights Wikipedia project because it's the most heartwarming one. And we thought we have the best chance to reach out to people's hearts basically with it. Our education team does a really great work with that. They have already thought something around 600 Seniors to write Wikipedia. And they have a new hobby, they have new friends, they have new purpose basically, it's really great. So we chose a local platform that we met and we were as specific as possible with our goal. We said last year we thought 100 Seniors to write Wikipedia and next year we want to reach 150 and in order to do that we need 30 regular donors, which we didn't end up succeeding in because we only got like three regulars from this campaign, but we reached the goal, the amount of money. We actually, the goal, the original goal was 30,000 so we got 40,000 crowns. Here are the outcomes. We got in total 43 donors, around 1600 euro to this day. A lot of new people attracted to the project, which I think is very important as well. And the whole campaign was just very feel good. We did a positive five. We did a video with real Seniors who took our courses and then Wikipedia really became their obsession in some cases, which is awesome. There was this female senior who said something like that, thanks to this project. I was alright in quarantine, otherwise I would be probably very nervous and stressed, but this helped me to get through it. So, really, people felt touched by that and the results speak for themselves, I think. How to take care of our donors? Well, you have to build a relationship with them. It's not just fundraising, it's fundraising really. You have to let them know that they're part of something important and you can do that through many channels. We usually do that through email, email marketing. We created a thank you email with Clara. Clara wrote it herself and we send it to every new donor that we have on that email. And we also create for special newsletters for them a year, so that they know how their money is being used and what do we do actually in fact. So, we also invite them to personal events and we thank them at the end of the year with a card. Promote your activities, like their success depends on it, because it does. There are many ways you can promote your activities and some of them that we use a lot are press releases, blog posts, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. We haven't used TikTok yet, but I think it would work. I don't have the capacity to do that yet, but it was just a little tip that I wanted to give you. I think it could be useful. You can also ask NGOs and companies to share your content. This one is actually quite useful for us. It doesn't cost anything to the companies and they can connect themselves with something meaningful. So most of them take that opportunity and it can end up in a higher reach. Coordination is the key. As I've said earlier, there are 10 team members in the Vicki Media Czech Republic. So, I have to talk to them and help them to promote their activities themselves because I cannot do it all on my own as I only work part-time. I create step-by-step tutorials for almost everything. We have tutorials for how to write a blog post, how to work with social media, how to do email marketing, which is also great for me. It saves me a lot of time because every time somebody asks me something, I can just send them a link, which is really useful for them, for me, for everyone. And in case I ever left this position, it would be much easier for me to train a new person. This is a system that Clara developed and she actually wants everybody in the team to do this and I think it's really great. So that's a little tip for you. PR calendar, with every PR output anybody does. Because when there are 10 people that do marketing activities, you have to know when is what output given. So, we use Asana, that's something Clara implemented and I think it works really great. We use it almost for every job that we do, every task. But with PR calendar, I think it's extremely useful because you don't want two emails to go to your supporters in one day. You don't want two Facebook blog posts being published at the same time. It's something you really have to avoid. So, every time anybody does something that goes out, they just write it here and before you put something out, you check it. If anybody has already sent an email today, you won't do it. You will do it tomorrow. It's very easy but saves a lot of time. In-person events. In-person events are something I think we're fairly good at. These are pictures of Czech Vicky Photo exhibition we did last year. Czech Vicky Photo is our contest of the best photos of Czech things on Vicky Media Commons. And the photos are actually displayed for a month in our Scout Institute in the heart of Prague. And this is a picture from the opening. We also did a discussion about free licenses on the same day and it was really lovely. It's a lot of stress and effort that actually pays off most of the time and it helps you create a real bond with both the public and the Vicky Media community. This is just a short video of poetry slam that we did on the same day. Poetry slam for Wikipedia. We hired artists that happened to be my friends to write poems about Wikipedia. It was very successful and I think it was a great bonus for people who were there. A lot of people came to see specifically poetry slam and they stayed for other activities as well. I think it's great to connect different words. So another experience brought our new theme this year which we prepared in a form of a monthly challenge. Namely Human Rights Month on Czech Wikipedia. This was a month long challenge to write articles about human rights. 100 articles were created or enriched. We held four online and offline editathons and we were able to evolve or we were supported by 20 different Czech non-profits organizations who take care of human rights and human rights topic in Czech Republic. If you are interested in this project you can find more on our recent article. So don't be afraid to talk about the awesome things you do. It's just as important as talking about the things you're going to do. To talk about the things you have already done and went well. And this is something we do a lot. I focus on a lot to follow up after every event. So this is a video from our Human Rights Month on Wikipedia editathon. It has English subtitles and I'm going to play it for you. I write about my favorite kind of interests which are usually used to describe gender identity. This is important because I think we should respect every right to identity and integrity. And I think it's important to respect those interests. When I go online I want to find the right information. And when we got to know each other, become partners with Wikimedia, it came to me perfectly because it's a human rights topic and it's a topic we've been working on for a long time. So who else should be the carrier of the information that the topic understands and knows about? Today I'm working on the new Heslo in Czech Wikipedia. I'm writing about Mahinur El-Masri, who is an Egyptian lawmaker and a lawmaker who, often without a license, is actively helping unjustly convicted people in Egypt. This topic is important to me because it works in the human rights section. It means that the human rights protection is also my duty and my full work. I enjoy my work and it's also my hobby. What it looked like last year, do you want to take part this year? I think it's pretty useful. Promote your activities like their taxes depends on it because it does. Very deep, yeah. So we reach out with press releases almost every time we do a bigger project. It usually pays off because we contact relevant media. For example, when we did our human rights month on Wikipedia, we went specifically for hate free culture and they were interested because it's a topic that they have been working on for years. So that's a little tip from me. Girls just want to have fun and, frankly, everybody does. Make, marketing and PR fun. It's not dead hard. And one of the things that we do that are fun actually, or at least I believe so, is two minutes with a Wikipedia series where we did already two seasons. And it's basically just talking to Wikipedia for two minutes and presenting the volunteering people, the volunteers, the Wikipedia to the public, and maybe sharing the idea that Wikipedia is created by volunteers, which is something unfortunately a lot of checks still don't know. So this is one of the ways to support free knowledge from our part. And we were actually quite successful with this. I did the analysis of the second series recently and I found out that for very small budget, only something like 40 euro on Facebook, we had 20,000 views on Facebook and more than 900 people click through to our donate page, which is not that bad. Only like two of them ended up donating, but I think it's a good result nevertheless. And now I would like to play one excerpt to you. 19 years, 22 days. Wikipedia age? 1 year and 140 years. Home town? Herdy Obczan Odlove, Okre Skarbina. A member with the longest name? I know it exactly, please. It's Kočar, Vyskupa, Julia Trojera z Trojeroštajnu. What is the function of Wikipedia and what does it mean? I am a writer on Wikipedia and I mainly use it to solve vandalism. What is vandalism? It's a measure of protection against vandalism. How many hours a week do you spend on Wikipedia? It's between 0 and 168. What do you mean by that? I tolerate it, but I don't get it. What is the number of photos taken on Wikimedia Commons? I think it goes up to 5000. In any case, about half of it is still waiting for its time. What is your photographic specialization? I am always very happy to take photos of people or, for example, the success of the sport for Wikimedia Commons. Now, with COVID, it went quite well, but I believe that I will take the chance. What kind of photo will you never forget? I think it will be a photo from the summer of June. It will definitely be a photo from the summer of June after the summer tournament. What stereotype of Wikipedia do you think is not true? That we are not just vandalism nerds. What stereotype of Wikipedia is true? That we are vandalism nerds. The host of 2 Minutes with Wikimedia Commons was T. Bednarz. Thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you too. Well, that's it. I'm really proud of this project and I'm thankful to Klada, our ED, that were able to do this. And I have to say one more thing about this. It was not expensive. Because the presenter is a keen Wikipedia and he is my friend and he did it for free. And the cameraman is the friend of both of us and he actually was very low-cost. So it wasn't pricey at all. And it's another thing that I want to encourage you to do to reach out to the Wikipedia community. Because you can find very passionate people who will do things in the name of free knowledge, basically. So that was all for me. Now I give the floor to Klada. Let's go to close this. So what does it change for me as an ED and my team to have an in-house PR specialist? I hope you saw it for yourself. I would describe this outcome is that we have definitely concentrated work on both topics. I mean public relations and fundraising. Our public presentation in numbers went up immediately. We were able to unified and strategic communication externally and coordinated it internally. And of course this freeing up the capacity of other team members. Of course you have to find the right person and persist even if everything looks at the beginning like never ending space like Sahara for example. So good luck everyone. Don't be afraid. I'm happy that we could share a few experiences with you. And we are always open and happy to share more with you. Feel free to reach us. Contact us not only if you have questions but if you was interested in any of our activities and you want to cooperate or connect our activities with your activities of your affiliate or your user group. We will be more than happy and as well both Natalia would like to start is the fundraiser supported group for Europe. So if you're interested in this, just write her an email. So thank you all for watching and have a great day on the Canadian.