6.1 Identifying contributor profiles

For effective community engagement, you first need to understand who is best suited to contribute. You can start by analyzing the capacity of contributors who have offered to help. For the projects in Hausa, Kanuri and Shuwa Arabic, we looked at the existing group of volunteers (linguists who had helped with translations over the years) and identified a number of key profiles. Here are some of the characteristics that we found to be very important:

• Speakers of the (dialect and other language features must match the goal of the project)

• They should have basic digital literacy (able to use mobile or web platforms).

• Community influencers — teachers, local partners, and language group leaders. These people play a key role in getting people to help collect data for . If you organize contributors into language groups, they work better and have a sense of belonging. It motivates them if they are part of a group effort.

• Experienced linguists () are useful for difficult tasks like prompt creation and validation. We found that using Language Leads helped to get people in the community involved in data collection.

• We motivated contributors by recognition, certificates, and sharing messages about the positive impact of their work.

We used the following workflow to find the right :

• Identify native speakers of the target language(s) (to match the goals of the project).

• Share information about the data collection project. Use clear messaging on the tasks involved, the reason for the project, and how important their help would be.

• If there is a in place, share details early on. Make it easy for contributors to access.

• Send out invitations to join. Include direct links and instructions on how to join the project.