Hi everyone, We are getting ready for announcing the finale results of Wiki Loves Monuments 2016 contest. This email gives you an update about what the WLM international team is busy with these days and how the coming week will look like, as best as we know it at the moment. Our focus at the moment is on communications. This includes working on the jury report, aligning social media efforts, and reaching out to news outlets and organizations for covering the story of WLM and announcing the finale results via their websites, social media, etc. There are a few reasons for a strong focus on communications for this week: We want to make sure that your efforts in organizing WLM 2016 in your country and participating in it gets the attention it deserves. It would also be great if we can support the photographers of WLM by bringing more eye-balls and attention to their work. And lastly, more coverage in the media means more brand recognition for WLM, something that will help all of us us walk on a stronger path for WLM 2017 and beyond. Here are more specifics: *Results* We expect to announce the results on Thursday, December 15 (UTC). There will be 15 winners in this year's finale. We will start the count down from photo rank 25 in https://twitter.com/wikimonuments and we move all the way to rank 1. At the moment, we have not fixed when exactly the count-down starts. We will announce that on this list once we are ready to fix the time. And of course, the results will be announced on https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2016_winners, in http://www. wikilovesmonuments.org/, and possibly in more places. *Coverage in news outlets* The WMF Communications team has worked tirelessly with us in the past weeks to build a strategy for increasing the chances of coverage of WLM story and the announcement of the final results. Thanks to those of you who have been helping us with this effort. More details: * A blog post about WLM 2016 went out on Friday: https://blog.wikimedia .org/2016/12/09/wiki-loves-monuments-human-heritage/ The goal of this blog post was to tell the story of WLM by sharing the story of some of the people who participated in this year's contest and their photos. The content of that blog post is also used as a press pitch to gauge the interest of news outlets for covering the announcement of the results in the coming week. (If you are a local organizer or WLM enthusiast, you should feel free to take that blog post and pitch it to your local news agencies for more coverage as well.) * Another blog post is being prepared for the announcement of the results on Thursday. Once that blog post is published (on Thursday), it would be great if you take that and share it with your local news outlets and heritage focused organizations to increase the chances of more coverage for WLM and the winners. The WMF Communications team uses this text to pitch to their relevant network of news outlets as well. On this front: if you have a direct contact in a news outlet that you think should/would cover WLM finale results, please email me offlist. *Preparing for traffic* We expect a lot of traffic to https://commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2016_winners starting Thursday, December 15. Between now and then, you may see us making changes to the page to make the content more easily/enjoyably viewable/discoverable from more devices (we expect a lot of traffic from mobile devices, especially when social media starts announcing the results). That's about it for now on our end. If you have questions/comments, please feel free to reach out to us on this thread (and if they need to stay private, off-list:). Looking forward to this week! :) Best, Lily -- User: LilyOfTheWest