Writing & Reviews - Application for The Communities of the Month Support Program
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Application for The Communities of the Month Support Program
We consider that it's extremely important to make users feel comfortable and to see that their work is actually well valuated, so, without doubt, this proposal made by @steemitblog, will mark a before and after in the entire Steemit ecosystem.
We do work incredibly hard towards making this community grow as much as we can and our main goal is to be one of the largest communities Steemit has.
Community Purpose
The purpose of the Writing & Reviews community is to offer a safe space to everyone in Steemit, where they can share their creative writings of any nature (poetry, short story, chapters of novels, simple ideas) and we also integrate the posts of reviews, both of books and of movies or television series.
Our community is one of a kind. There's no other community in Steemit that covers this topics and we do have a lot of users that show an enormous commitment to it. They've expressed their gratitude on numerous occasions for providing them with this space, and that's why we work our hardest to provide them with as much support as we can.
What we offer in our community is simple and easy, everyone that reads "Writing & Reviews" understand what can be found in here. All sorts of creative content and writings is supported in here, as well as all types of reviews. This is what allows us to reach so many people: we give them the freedom to express themselves. We welcome anyone, you don't have to be a professional writer to share with us, we encourage everyone to have the nerve to try to write out of their comfort zone and we cheer them whenever they do it!
Also, we give them different opportunities for them to write. We have plenty of creative contests that go from posting reviews on movies or books, creating a poetry or a short story... but as well as that, we also want everyone to develop their best and to learn every single day. If there's someone that doesn't feel that comfortable with creative writing, we encourage them to write a review on the book or movie they've seen lately. If that doesn't work, we support them to share their Diary Game with us... and so on, we always aim to give more and more opportunities to everyone to feel safe enough to write and free their mind.
There have been other writing communities in this platform, such as Freewriters, but it hasn't been successful in over a while now and it doesn't include the Reviews part, which is extremelly popular and fun to participate between our users.
We want our subscribers to feel welcome, safe and appreciated in our community. As we have already said, we work incredibly hard towards achieving new goals and that's reflected on how much we get to grow week through week. We value every single one of our fellow writers, we think of new and creative ideas or them to have fun and feel included.
Community Team
The community is run by admins @fendit and @belenguerra. Both of us are from Argentina and have a good management of English skills, which allow us to post either in Spanish or English, which is mainly two of the most spoken languages in Steemit. Either way, we allow our users to post in any language they feel comfortable writing in, as we can help ourselves with different high-quality translators.
As we have had so much growth lately, we're currently looking for users that we trust and that are commited to our community to offer them a possition as moderators. By doing this, we will need to work on a reward schedule for the team, as admins are not currently being paid for their hard work in the community.
We already have a number of users that we'd like to talk about and discuss with them if they'd like to be part of the Writing & Reviews family, but we're still working on the details.
As well as this, everyone has access to our Discord ID's, if there's anything they want to discuss or talk with us on private. We want to be there for anyone that needs us. It's part of the encouragement we're working on, and we believe it's really important that everyone feels listened to and taken into account. We don't want anyone to feel that they can't be close to us, we're all part of the Writing & Reviews family.
Growth
Writing & Reviews is a community that grows incredibly fast and is really good accepted among new users and those ones who don't feel supported in other communities.
We grow at a very fast pace of almost 100/150 subscribers per week, which is represented by a 2.5 to 4% increase weekly. These rates are incredibly high, considering the fact that we have almost 6.500 subscribers in ten months, since this community has been created. As well as this, when we presented August's application, we hadn't crossed the 6K subscribers bareer, which means an increase of 8% regarding last month and over 500 new users.
Our active users tend to be on average of 300-350 weekly, which we believe can increase a lot more if we received a bit more support. We don't mean to complain, as we're really grateful towards this community and every gold opportunity that Steemit Team has given us, but we have seen more than once that other communities receive a lot more support than we do and we don't understand why. We have asked for suggestions and how we can receive more visits from @ steemcurator01 for our fellow writers, we have taken into account those suggestions but nothing seemed to change. This past week we have received a bit more support, which we're really grateful for!!
If given more support, and considering all the actions and activities we're developing, we believe that Writing & Reviews can increase their presence in the Steemit platform a lot more. Us, as admins, have set a really high goal, which is to become one of the largest and best communities Steemit has... and we dare say we're doing it very good and working extremelly hard towards reaching it.
Community Curation Account
Our community curation account is @writingnreviews. Up to now, we have 6,741 SP, from which 3,741 SP has been built by us thanks to the support we have received from @ steemcurator01 and the remaining 3.000 SP has been delegated by our fellow users.
As part of our plan to increase and build more SP, this past month we have increased the number of posts that are done in this account and there are a couple of things we have been developing towards reaching our goal:
Contests: We have increased the number of just one weekly contest to two and we're working towards three contests simultaneously. We have performed again our Flash Contests (which are easier tasks with less time than a week) and they have been incredibly popular among our subscribers. We aim to increase the number of contests so as to feel everyone welcome and included in our activities, also this is a great way of engaging with the users and get to know what they like the most. As well as this, we have increased the prizes from 25 STEEM to 50 and 75 STEEM per contest, so as to encourage everyone to participate and give their best.
Reminders and institutional posts: We have developed a series of posts in which users are reminded that they have little time left to participate in our contests and other constructive information that they might need. For example, we let our users know that we will support all posts that are created for The Diary Game, as a way to encourage this idea that was proposed by @ steemitblog. Examples can be found here: WRITING & REVIEWS + THE DIARY GAME & 🛑 QUICK REMINDER: FEW HOURS LEFT TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS WEEK'S CONTESTS 🛑 // 🛑 RECORDATORIO: POCAS HORAS PARA PARTICIPAR EN LOS CONCURSOS DE ESTA SEMANA 🛑
- Delegation program: As a way of helping users, we have launched our Delegations Program, in which we welcome anyone who feels like helping our community account grow. As a reward for their generosity, on a monthly basis, we distribute the curation rewards that were created on a proportional way to everyone who delegated to us. Last update on our delegation program.
All our posts are set for 100% power up, as we want to build our account's SP. We only set up certain posts with a payout reward whenever we run out of STEEM to pay for contest winners and delegators rewards. Also, we have seen lately that users feel so grateful towards our community that they have set @writingnreviews as a beneficiary of a percentage of their posts, which makes us feel incredibly happy.
Us, the admins, have access to the voting account and we give priority to contest entries and The Diary Game posts. We try to reach as many users as we can, as we want everyone to have votes and comments on their posts. We have had Booming's support for quite some time now and that helps us a lot encouraging our users to get to post and create their best writings. We give priority too to users that have been verified and that post Steem exclusive content.
Plagiarism & Abuse
When it comes to plagiarism, we have stated our opinion more than once and we're working really hard towards fighting it. Every single post gets checked and we pay special attention to all accounts, so as to check that there's no one with two accounts posting in our community or doing any sort of content farming. This is vital to us and we have increased how much we check every post. We use three different apps to check for plagiarism or anyone that's copying things and spinning words, as well as looking for the places in which these things were stolen from.
Both of the admins are in charge of checking this kind of stuff at the moment of curating with the community account. As well as that, once we have mods, we will ask them to help us with this and we'll let them know that this is a very delicate and important issue to us. Also, we do get help from time to time from @endingplagiarism and @endplagiarism04 to catch these thieves...
Regarding the images, we always ask that they cite the source from which they have obtained it, we point out the cases in which they share photos with a watermark (which is not allowed), and if the photos are of their own authorship, we ask that they provide data of the device used to take them.
Lately, we have found a lot of offenders that were posting stolen content in Writing & Reviews, that's why we decided it was time to start posting this kind of things and including a tag to identify that these users were not behaving in a good way.
Our protocol against plagiarism is simple, effective and easy:
First warning: We mute that post and we let the user know that we won't tolerate that kind of attitudes. We keep score of these users and, if they have already their user verified, we also warn them that they will get their tag removed if that happens again.
Second warning: This is the final warning. We give no other opportunity to those who choose to perform this kind of actions over and over again. We mute the post and leave a comment, in which we specify that it's the second time we found these immoral activities and that we will no longer support their posts. Also, we put a "Bad Habits ❌" tag, so that it shows that the user has been performing poorly in our community.
This is the first report on the offenders we've found:
As well as that, we kept on verifying users, so as to provide more transparency to our community. So far, we have verified almost 240 users and there have been a couple of suspicious accounts we have seen.
To get a verified tag, users must provide a selfie photo, in which they have handwritten their username, the date and "Writing & Reviews" in a piece of paper. Each picture gets checked in detail, so as to avoid anyone that might have photoshopped the writing parts.
Here's the last report we have submitted for the verified users:
Engagement & Commenting
As we've stated before, we want everyone to feel as a valuable part of our community and, as a consequence of that, we aim to visit as many posts as we can. As well as that, by creating all sorts of different contests, we get to know our subscribers a lot more and that helps us create good quality content that's helpful and important for them.
Lately, we have also seen that a lot of users are commited to visitng and commenting on other user's posts, leaving their opinion on their writings and giving valuable feedback. We believe this is amazing, as this sense of ownership and community is what really helps us grow in a more organic and integral way.
We aim to always provide good quality contests and content to our users. That's why not long ago we asked for some feedback on what they'd like to see on our community and what their perception is of Writing & Reviews. We were really happy as we received a lot of great feedback:
Plans, Updates & Activities
This is a community with a very high growth rate and we're really grateful towards it, which shows the incredible amount of hard work that's behind it. From day to night we work on all different sorts of new ideas to sustain and achieve an organic growth.
As a way of encouraging our users, we do perform certain activities on a weekly basis:
Top Picks of the Week: We choose those posts that were a highlight of the week. For quite some time, we didn't receive any support for these posts and some users let us know about their discomfort about it, but luckily this past week we have received the support for them.
Booming Support: We have been part of this program for quite some time now, as Steemit Team picked us from the very first time trusting in our commitment and engagement with the platform, and it has been an incredible help for us. Our users keep on learning and developing new ways of creating great content to be picked for this support and that has helped us increase a lot the traffic of posts that we have.
Weekly reports as CRs: Both admins are CRs for Argentina, which means that we get to post on a weekly basis what we've been working on in Steemit. This allows everyone to see in a transparent and clear way what's going on in the community and how things are handled. Luckily, we have always received positive feedback from Steemit Team and our fellow writers, and there's nothing more fulfilling than that!! We aim for transparency always.
Contests: As we've stated before, we provide contests weekly and daily with interesting tasks and prizes, so that everyone feels like being part of Writing & Reviews and gets something to write about. Also, this is a good way of also promoting great content creators, which we have plenty of! :)
User verification: It has been accepted greatly and we're working to verify as many users as we can. This program is up and running smoothly to provide with more transparency.
Delegation program: Another program that's running greatly. We have just posted our first rewards distribution for the users that have delegated to us and it has been a great incentive for new users to delegate even more SP to us.
Daily discussion: This is a brand new idea that we haven't launched yet, but we plan on proposing a topic for the day and ask our users about their opinion on them. By doing this, we aim to broaden our mind and lete us all learn from different points of views, which is great since Writing & Reviews has a lot of users from different parts of the world and we embrace those cultural differences as much as we can :)
Helpful posts: Both admins are always posting great content that helps our users perform better at their posts, create good content for Steemit, create good posts for contests and also improve their writing skills. We try to post as much as we can from this kind of informational posts, which have been incredibly accepted among our users. Examples can be found here: ⭐ HINT: How to create a good post for our contests ⭐// ⭐ PISTA: Cómo hacer una buena publicación para ganar nuestros concursos ⭐ & 👩💻 The art of being a blogger on Steemit 👨💻 / 👩💻 El arte de ser un blogger en Steemit 👨💻
As both admins are really good friends, we talk on a daily basis about this community. There's nothing better than team work and working towards the same goals, so we're always coming up with new ideas and stategies to increase the number of active users and subscribers.
Promotion
We have started with a plan of promoting Writing & Reviews in Facebook and Twitter. We plan on developing these strategies even more when we name our mods, so that they can help us achieve more users in these social networks.
At first, we aim to invite and let writers know about the existance of Steemit. As this is people that is already creating content, we want to let them know that they can get paid for their contents and we have a plan of retention and encouragement for them.
These new users will be recluted from different writing pages in Facebook, we have already found a great number of writing groups that are likely to be interested in Steemit and the way we work. When it comes to Twitter, we want to browse different hashtags related to writing and creative contents.
Facebook and Twitter will be our first attempt in promoting Writing & Reviews outside Steemit. Moving forward, we aim to create a Youtube channel with educational videos on how to use Steemit, what they can do in here and how to perform their best. Also, we're analyzing what can be done in Wordpress, as we can create a website promoting all the activities that we perform in here.
Additional info
We will be writing this part wholeheartedly. For both of us, the admins, Writing & Reviews is so much more than we ever expected. Just as we always say, we never expected to get this far and to be this impressive, large and great community we are.
In less than a year Writing & Reviews has presented an impressive growth, going from being created in September 2020, to having almost 6500 subscribers by August 2021. We're really grateful to have been encouraged by @cryptokannon to create all this, which we would have never dared to.
Since we wake up till we get to bed, both of us are constantly talking and coming up with ideas of how we can make everyone feel part of this community and to make them feel as welcome as we feel in here. Everyone's important to us and we never take anyone for granted, we highly appreciate all content that gets shared here and we're really happy whenever we see that new users are coming along.
We would love to be able to give them good support, there are incredible writers who have found their place to express their written art. Their original and soulful content deserves to be rewarded, and we are very excited to offer them more. We know that writing takes a lot of time, effort, commitment and compromise... and that's why we feel the need to provide them with support and encourage them as much as we can.
We have such strong sense of commitment and engagement towards this community that we want everyone to be part of it as well. So there's not much else to say but thank you to all those who're part of our dream community and to the Steemit Team for giving us such great opportunities since the very first moment. We couldn't be more grateful for all that has happened so far and for all that is yet to come!
Thanks a lot for being always there for us and for keep offering opportunities to grow and expand as a community!
With love,
@fendit & @belenguerra
Hello dear friends @writingnreviews good afternoon
Excellent presentation, without a doubt we will get the support of our community
They are doing a great job.
I wish the whole team a beautiful afternoon
Muchisimas gracias por tu apoyo incondicional, amigo!!
Lo apreciamos muchisimo! :)
Best of luck @writingnreviews.
Thank you friend!!
Hello everyone my name is @allahnawaz03 .I am frim the pakistan whuch us very beautiful country.I belong to nice family.I am very happy to be a part of this coummity.I hope you that I will soon verified 😀.
💞Special💞Mentions:
Cc:
@belenguerra
@fendit
@writingnreviews
Nice post
Wow! After reading all of this, all I have to say is : Everyone, put on your seatbelts, the writing and reviews community is about to enter a whole new level. 😄
I’m very sure that in a few months from now, we won’t be among the best communities on steemit, we will be the best community on steemit.
Cheers!
Yayyyyyyyyyy!!
Thank you for such kind words, friend!!
It's going to be a very tough journal... but it will definitively worth it!!
Thank you so much for always being here!!
Mi gran apoyo para la comunidad y a mis queridas @belenguerra y @fendit quienes día a día hacen un excelente trabajo.👍
Muchisimas gracias por tu apoyo, amiga!!! :)
I am sure that we will get selected this time
🤩🤩
We really hope so!!
Thank you so much friend :)
¡Hola! Les deseo mucha suerte y un gran apoyo tanto a ustedes como a la comunidad que en poco tiempo ha logrado muchísimo y le esperan un buen camino lleno de éxitos :D
Muchisimas gracias por tu apoyo, amiga!!
No te das una idea lo que significa para nosotras :)
Es increíble que una comunidad tenga tantos proyectos administrados solo por dos personas, cuando en otras se necesitan muchísimas para lograr lo que se ha logrado aquí. Además, debo recalcar el compromiso que han tenido ambas en pro de todos los usuarios que publican sus contenidos, lo que nos motiva a seguir aquí compartiendo e interactuando. No hay duda de que Writing & Reviews se está imponiendo como una de las mejores comunidades de Steemit, y estoy 100% seguro que muy pronto alcanzará la cima 🥳.
¡Éxitos al equipo!