All categories
Organise Campaigns
Problem
Contributors’ attention needs to be focused on a milestone or a specific set of tasks.
Context
Focusing the attention of the project on shorter-term goals can help build engagement, recruit new users or increase participation. It can also be a useful way to focus attention on smaller goals, such as increasing coverage, fixing errors or capturing new types of data
Solution
Ensure you have a set of clearly defined, well-documented tasks for the community to achieve. Create a Progress Indicator to help you and the community to monitor progress.
Organise and promote a campaign asking the community to work together to complete these tasks.
In larger projects that involve collecting a variety of data, it can be useful to break up the overall goal of the project into smaller sub-goals which have clearly defined outcomes and tasks.
These goals might be about increasing coverage of the dataset, eg to add specific types of record, fields or information about a geographic location. They might also be required to help address quality issues (eg broken links).
Campaigns are a means of focusing community attention on smaller goals, providing a sense of progress and helping move the project forward. A Progress Indicator can be a helpful part of a campaign.
If you have an Evolving Schema, a campaign might also help encourage contributors to populate new fields. Adopting a Shared Canvas approach can encourage interest groups to agree how to catalogue and describe specific types of data.
You might also want to Gamify Contributions to further drive participation.
A campaign could be run by the project team, or by sections of the community. For example, if you Encourage Interest Groups, they could organise and run a campaign, so that they can collect and improve the data they are interested in.
Campaigns can be run online, but could be supported by events that bring the community together in a location.
Related patterns
Encourage Interest Groups
It is difficult to effectively support a broad, diverse community from the centre.
Build a Rhythm
People in a distributed community collaborating on a common task can feel disconnected from one another.
Follow Your Users
It can be difficult to decide which communication and collaboration tools are best to use on a project.