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Objectives

  • Enhance visibility of African researchers and their work
  • Disseminate African knowledge
  • Enable research exchange inside the continent
  • Foster cross-continental collaboration
  • Inform African scientists about Open Access and Open Science practices
  • Enhance visibility of the platform/website www.africarxiv.org
  • Connect to likeminded initiatives and institutions
  • Connect with African research stakeholders
  • Fundraising for the platform, overhead & infrastructure (crowdfunding)

Read and add to our Community Engagement Wiki.

Communication Channels

Engage  Discuss
Github: /AfricArxiv Gitter: https://gitter.im/africarxiv-com/Lobby
--- Slack: https://africarxiv.slack.com
--- Twitter: @AfricArxiv
Facebook page: /AfricArxiv Facebook group: /groups/africarxiv/
Linkedin: /africarxiv ---
--- Whatsapp community: invite link
--- Telegram community: invite link
Medium.com (medium.com/@africarxiv) ---

Optimizing Participation in Different Channels

  • Facebook - Whole community of stakeholders and general audience and most activity/discussions taking place
  • Slack - AfricArXiv core/implementing team and community of contributors
  • Github - Active contributors to the repository
  • WhatsApp & Telegram - Use for crowdsourcing engagement in calls and projects. Also for dissemingating information to the AfricArxiv community and team.
  • Facebook group - Use for general announcements and updates on our services Members can ask questions and get quick answers from the team or other members Members can exchange information about open science, Open Access and preprints

Collaborate

Join us in spreading the word about scholarly communication in and about Africa with us. Here is what you can do:

  • Submit your research output to the AfricArXiv repository: https://info.africarxiv.org/submit/
  • Join any of our communication channels: https://info.africarxiv.org/contact/
  • Reach out to your academic network and tell them about AfricArXiv
  • Let us know if you would like to join our team by emailing
  • Translate with us abstracts and summaries into traditional African languages
  • Make suggestions on how else to spread the word about Research in Africa

Contact us at [email protected]

Metrics

Help collect social media metrices using the following evaluations:

Narrative

Twitter

  • Announce accepted preprint manuscripts
  • Announce new entries as they come in
  • Announce old entries highlighting the number of downloads
  • Check if the corresponding author has a Twitter account and can thus be tagged
  • Add hashtags (keywords)
  • Make official announcements
  • Post links to blog posts
  • Feature authors
  • Feature topics
  • Reply to posts and conversations affecting AfricArXiv

Tips for a great Tweet:

  • Keep Tweets between 100 and 120 characters so others can modify or add short notes before retweeting.
  • Take the time to write a proper sentence (including grammar and punctuation) that fits within the character limit.
  • Encourage conversation and build your audience by posing questions to elicit curiosity, quoting others (with proper citation), and thanking those who mention you or pass your message along.
  • Shorten links
  • Accompany your Tweet with a strong and bright image
  • Maintain your own personality.(you're not a robot)

automated tweets

Facebook: same as Twitter

Tips for a great Facebooks post:

  • Stay positive.Use inspiring, funny and re-affirming words.
  • Pose questions, tell stories, and use language that encourages commenting and interaction with your page.
  • Interact with your followers and fans, as well as other people who comment on posts in your feed.
  • Add comments to your older posts to bring it up in the newsfeed again.

Linkedin

  • Make official announcements
  • Post links to blog posts
  • feature authors
  • feature topics

Tips for a great LinkedIn post:

  • Keep it short. Give your audience just enough to know why you shared it and what it means to them.
  • Stay interested to be more interesting. Reply to those who comment on your posts and like any of their content that has value for you. Commenting on your own post can open up conversation as well, which leads to more engagement and increased visibility.
  • Tag people or companies that you are connected to, it gives your post more authority. Make sure the posts are related and will be welcomed by those you are tagging.
  • Don’t forget the power of images. Add a vibrant image or have the link shared contain a vibrant image.

Language

  • Use English for the most part - intersecting with French
  • African Languages esp. for region specific content but also randomly

Scheduling Posts

Apart from posting manually in individual social platforms, you can also consider using the following mobile and web-based applications to schedule your posts:

  • Hootsuite
  • Buffer
  • ...

Tip:

  • Create your own account in the preferred platform dedicated for scheduling posts on AfricArxiv social media handles
  • Connect the accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Take time to create content for each handle. You may use an excel sheet to organize your content to ensure you have enough posts until when you can post again. See Excel Template (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FR6cHtX-0qTT5CdY7w0GBBrTbFxSPwCVKrIPC7BaIJ8/edit?usp=sharing)
  • Schedule posts either manually or automatically and follow up with comments, likes and shares to keep your community engaged, and interested.
  • Schedule regularly to have content for every week.

Frequency

  • Twitter: 3-5 per day; Focus on quantity -one post per hour is optimal (retweets inculded)
  • Facebook: 5-10 per week; Focus on quality - aim for 2 posts per day to keep the audience interested
  • Linkedin: 2-5 per week; Focus on formal, technical content - posts get more traction during the work week

Newletters

Community Newsletters to keep our volunteers and community interested and updated

It is so important in:

  • Keeping everyone informed on important changes. No one likes feeling out of the loop.
  • Creating clarity between disparate teams. Showing what different teams are accomplishing cultivates understanding between groups that don’t usually work together.
  • Putting an end to multiple, endless email threads. Instead of news being sent out piecemeal through multiple email threads, you can just send one awesome email.
  • Encouraging social advocacy. Including things coworkers can share on social makes it easier for them to become social advocates.
  • Ensuring important messages don’t get lost. Tools like Slack are great, but it can be hit-or-miss whether your messages get seen there or not.
  • Gives team info they can share with their friends and family.
  • Reinforces transparency.
  • Prevents people from saying “I didn’t get the memo.” If your newsletter becomes habit-forming, they’ll always be in the know.

What to include in the Newsletter:

  • New Team Members
  • Achievements
  • Internal Policy Changes
  • Revenue Updates
  • Events/Holiday Announcements
  • Show Off What Teams are Working On
  • Highlighting Teams Accomplishments
  • Awards
  • Interesting Industry Articles
  • Latest Blog Post
  • New Feature or New Project/Product Announcement
  • Notes from the Leadership Team
  • Day-in-the-life Stories
  • Success Stories
  • AfricArXiv News Coverage
  • How-to Blog Posts
  • Fun moments
  • Community Questions and Answers

Next, You Newsletter Content Strategy

So, that’s plenty of ideas to get you thinking. At some point though, you’ll need to determine what types of content you’ll include in each newsletter. Keeping it consistent makes it easier to gather and write what you need, rather than wondering what to include.

If you need a starting point, here’s an example of a standard mix:

  • 5 pieces of organization-related news.
  • 3 pieces of content from around the web.
  • 1 “fun” piece.
  • An upcoming company events calendar.
  • Call-to-action soliciting questions from around the company.

do what works best for your situation

Tips:

  • Font: Use Arial/Helvetica
  • Use Humor Sparingly
  • Keep it Concise
  • Be Truthful
  • Prioritize Important Information First
  • Create captivating and unique headlines and subject line for each email to get people excited about reading the newsletter.
  • When drafting articles, Keep sentences 20-25 words or less and keep paragraphs at three sentences or fewer.

-Afterwards >> Give it a Name to make it more recognizable

-Establish Tone and Voice Voice: This is what you sound like all the time. Tone: This is the inflection you apply to your voice.

Design and Schedule your Newsletter

  • Decide on a template
  • Decide on plain text newsletter or visual newsletter
  • Schedule your Newsletters according to the desirable frequency

Measure Impact according to:

  • Open rates
  • Click-through rates
  • Click-to-open rates

Getting Feedback

Listen to direct feedback from recipients. Once you’ve been sending these emails for a while, send out a survey asking what people think. Include questions like:

  • How often would you like to get these updates?
  • Is there any information that’s not useful?
  • Is there anything you’d like to see added?
  • Do you have other thoughts you’d like to share?

review the headlines and proofread before sending out

Preprints

Posting Preprints

A #preprint from South Africa and the USA: Berger, L. R., & Hawks, J. (2020, January 30). Revisiting the age of the Florisbad hominin materia https://doi.org/10.31730/osf.io/eqs7d #Pleistocene #anatomy #homosapiens

Hashtags

  • 3-5 study specific hashtags that already exist on twitter
  • Not too research-specific but specific to the topic of study

Images

  • Screenshots from the accepted submission
  • 1 overview image and 1 or 2 selected figures & tables
  • Include the AfricArXiv logo on top of each screenshot
  • Ensure that table or image description is also in the screenshot
  • You can achieve this by adjusting the size of the browser window (zoom screen size from 100% to about 125% or 150%)

alt text

alt text

alt text

Interviews

Interview is an important social listening tool that helps you to know the sentiments of the users from their previous experience with the repository.

Administering an Interview

The interview qestions are available in this directory:user-interview.md To administer an interview, select one email at a time from the authors database (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aGfIBzEGvu4PwcBMv-c2IrU6r3i_MpBscu0SMj3OCNI/edit?usp=sharing)

  • copy paste the questions into the email body and send
  • you can use the following email format (feel free to be creative)

Dear (First Name),

Thank you for using AfricArXiv for the dissemination of your research results. Your manuscript entitled: (Title and link to the article), was downloaded (no of downloads) times until today. We would like to take this opportunity to ask a few questions about your experience in using AfricArXiv/OSF and also to feature your work in a blog post on our website: https://info.africarxiv.org/news/

Would you be interested to participate? Please respond to the following questions:

(add questions)

Feel free to ask any questions you might have.

Best regards,

Pubslishing a Blogpost of the Interview

  • Upon receiving the responses, publish them into a blog post for enagement of other existing users and potential users

Activities (planned)

Monthly community calls / webinars

  • assess what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve
  • communicate goals, challenges and wins with the team
  • invite other initiatives to present their tools & services with Open Science in Africa
  • follow up on the webinars we had
  • presenting and hot to comment with hypothesis
  • peer review on AfricArXiv
  • presenting our partners
  • tips for publishing
  • Open Access stakeholders and policies in Africa

Events

  • …