Dear Foundation colleagues,
After 5.5 years, September 2 will be my last day at the Wikimedia Foundation. During my tenure here, I was able to work with different teams within the Community Engagement department, supporting them with storytelling, graphic design, and audience development and growth. This experience has allowed me to
design a communications framework for community engagement, and prove that yes! It works! If you do strategic communication planning, you can dramatically increase audience engagement. A few examples of my work are:
- Learning and Evaluation Audience. Over the course of four years (2014–2018), our audience grew 400% (from about 30 to 120 participants), and the quality of engagement also changed. Participants shifted from being consumers of information, to becoming contributors of workshops and trainings, with 50% of sessions facilitated by open source contributors.
- Inspire New Readers Campaign (2018).For this project, led by Kacie Harold, I developed the content for the campaign and designed the distribution strategy. Compared to the average outcomes of the four previous campaigns, there was a 236% increase in ideas submitted, and a 114% increase in contributors.
- Global Wikimedia Survey (2018). For this project, led by Edward Galvez, I designed an outreach strategy targeting volunteer developers. The response rate for this specific group grew by 37%.
Since 2018, I have also led the conversation series
Women in the Wikimedia movement, which I hope to continue in my capacity as volunteer. The opportunity to work with many of you has been invaluable; I have learned so much. I also really enjoyed working in cross-department projects, like the new editor experiences research, and the movement organizers research.
While all of you that I’ve met (virtually or in-person) have had an impact on me, there are a few people I wanted to thank in the all-org email:
Sasha. I love the energy you bring to the office. I will miss our conversations about food, specifically, about sushi. I think the Foundation is very lucky to have someone who brings her authentic self *every single day* to work.
Doreen. Thank you for the sense of humor and the loud laughter
Karen Z. Thank you for the honest conversations.
Jaime Anstee. Thank you for the radical inclusion.
Marti. Thank you for every time that we spoke. I learned so much about non-violent communication from you, and it has changed my life.
Winifred. Thank you for learning key Argentinean phrases and using them at the right time.
Abbey. You are an un-veil-or of worlds, a designer of cosmovisions, and all-time research rockstar. I learned so much from you about contextual inquiry and user experience research. Thank you for sharing your talent with me.
Moriel. Your commitment to supporting women, professionally and emotionally, is remarkable. I feel very lucky to have met you and shared this time at the Foundation with you.
Srishti. Thank you for all the honest conversations and for your support and openness.
Dana. I will miss your kindness and open heart.
Chris Koerner. Thank you for all the dad jokes, and for being such a great thinking buddy. I will miss working with you.
Unfortunately, I can no longer afford to work at the Wikimedia Foundation. With 11 years of experience in marketing communications (most of which are in the non-profit sector), I was hoping to have a more senior role at this time in my career. While this didn't happen for me at the Foundation, it is very rewarding to see so many people that I have coached or trained get to leadership positions here.
If you enjoyed working with me, consider leaving a recommendation for me on
my LinkedIn profile.
I wish you all the best,
María
María Cruz \\ Communications and Outreach manager, Community Engagement \\ Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.