Greetings Program Leaders and Evaluators!

Important updates from Learning and Evaluation:

== Now planning for in-person pre-conference workshop day for Wikimedia Conference ==

It is that time of the year again! Our team is beginning to plan a new set of pre-conference workshops with a focus on programs evaluation and design for Wikimedia Conference [1]. We will dedicate half a day to introduction topics on Wednesday (May 13) in the pre-conference agenda. Our team will also offer applied workshops on your selected toolkit topics during open Thursday (May 14).

If you are planning to attend Wikimedia Conference 2015, we need your insights! We want to know which workshops and session offerings are most desired, and who among conference attendees are available to attend. In order to help us design the best agenda for these days, please fill out our brief survey to share your availability to participate and which topics are of most interest. Importantly, the Wikimedia Foundation is able to cover the additional cost of the 1 or 2 extra nights stay for up to 30 participants to join us. Please let us know your interest right away by completing the survey now through January 23. Find the survey here:

https://jfe.qualtrics.com/form/SV_1WYr5sUhvF5aeAR

== New video available: Frame your measures to tell the story you want ==

To mark the end of the learning series “Telling your program’s story” , we celebrated the last virtual event: “Framing your measures to tell the story you want” on December 17. On that day, Wikimedia DE joined us to discuss what it means to work on advocacy, how to plan and later report on the efforts made in this respect, and what are the struggles they face when doing this. The meet up also went over how and why framing is important, as well as best practices and tools to capture the work of an organization or program and put it out there. You can now find the video of the virtual event on our Youtube channel [2]. And find presentations and extra resources on the series page on Meta [3]. Enjoy!

== Find out more about IEG and PEG Inspire Campaign! ==

As part of a new experiment to focus on gender gap, next round of Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) and 3 months (February - April) of 2015 for Project and Events Grants (PEG) will be directed on proposals that focus on increasing diversity and reduce this systematic bias. In the first half of 2014, IEG and PEG combined have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ⅓ of our grantee project leaders have been women. Please note this does not mean that grant proposals that are time sensitive and do not focus on gender gap will be ignored - urgent requests of all types can still be submitted during this time. The aim of this campaign is, in this sense, to make gender gap a priority and change the current trend. Find out more on the campaign’s page on IdeaLab [4]!

== How did you engage with L&E in 2014? ==

To celebrate the closing of a great year for Program Evaluation and Design at Wikimedia, we evaluated how our audience engages with the team on social networks. To this end, we published a graphic [5] that shows how program leaders go from following to engaging, endorsing and contributing, this last, the core of social media efforts. We want to increase participation in 2015! So don’t be shy and share your learning processes, findings and outcomes on our social networks. Remember you can contribute by posting on our facebook group [6] or twitting to @WikiEval.

As always, stay up-to-date by connecting on our portal [7].

On behalf of the Program Evaluation and Design team, thank you for your time and attention.