2014 Activity Plan/Volunteer Support

Lead member of staff

Katie Chan

Indicative budget amount

£37,000 total

As an indication, the budget could be divided into following areas: £2,000 for general support and events; £5,000 for local Wales and Scotland activities respectively; £18,000 for project grants; £12,000 travel grants

Description and overall rationale

Volunteer support is the central key to growing our capacity and engagement with our community. An extensive volunteer programme has been established and a Volunteer Support member of staff appointed. She has created a working plan and we intend to commission a study into developing our volunteer base when capacity allows within the next year. A lot of the activities in this stream of activity will come from the proposals in our agreed volunteer activity programme – see the volunteering strategy. This budget has, as its fundamental aim, the ambition that initiatives come from our community. If staff support is needed in addition to financial support, it will be given.

Key elements include local activities focused on Wales and Scotland (Wales supported additionally by the Wales Manager and the Living Paths project); local activities in England: volunteer meetings, editathons, training for the volunteers (as per demand, e.g. media and photography workshops, to supplement our Train the Trainer courses and the continuing support through our Virtual Learning Environment); grants programme & scholarships. It has in the past and will continue to react to initiatives from the community.

Main goals are supporting new volunteers in order to grow the community, and supporting the community with resources to increase their activity and participation in WMUK projects. These activities may in turn result in further positive changes, e.g. increase content of Wikipedia.

For the Grants page, please see here.

For background, 2013 travel grants draft breakdown is here.

Volunteer equipment details in 2013 are here.

Timelines - i.e. what happens quarter by quarter

Success criteria and Metrics - overall and quarter by quarter breakdown if relevant

Goals

The quantity and quality of Open Knowledge continues to increase:

• As an indication, aim to have >3,000 media files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons that are either generated by our pool of volunteer equipment or as a result of support from our Project Grants (Commons categories)
• We will also contribute to our global content quality targets

We have a thriving community of WMUK volunteers:

• 140 leading volunteers (with <10% drop out)
• Leading activity units 145
• Activity units 1200

We have a skilled community of WMUK volunteers:

• Activity units spent in training sessions and editathons (ie WMUK volunteers being trained - 30 (training opportunities for volunteers on top of Train the Trainer)
• We will run a capability score survey to find out what skills our volunteers have and where can we support them

We have a diverse community of WMUK volunteers:

• Proportion of activity units attributable to women - 20%
• Proportion of leading activity units attributable to women - 15%
• Activity units in activities to encourage other diversity or minority engagement - 15

Operationally, we want to make sure that the following things take place:

• Friends' newsletter sent out monthly - An open rate of 40%, and from open emails a clickthrough rate of 60% (civiCRM). We aim at reaching 420 friends in 2014-15
• Receive 25 Project Grants per year and work with volunteers to make at least 80% application approved for funding within one month (grants wiki page)
• Have 3 active meetups per month, and activity in Wales and Scotland (on wiki)
• >300 hours of use of our volunteer computer equipments per year (log system)

Risks

• Poor take up from our small volunteer base leading to lack of activity and underspend.
• For grants, conflicts of interest.
• The UK community fractures or atrophies with disagreements
• Inadequate volunteer base (to mitigate - Planned development of volunteer base, Target under-represented groups, Monitor trends in numbers and profile)