Communications

Emails

General protocols

• Coordinate with the country/region Meta representative in order to get the list of prospective participants to the training.
• Have a main email thread that includes all the participants, trainers, and coordinators from Meta for general communication and announcements that affect all the participants—e.g. links to materials, reminders, booking of mentoring calls. The introductory email sent by the trainer can be the start of this thread.
• Prior to the training, send an email at least once a week to the main thread to remind participants to answer the pre-event survey (if they haven’t yet), download and install QGIS, download the datasets needed, save the training schedules and Zoom links to their calendars, etc.
• For individual reminders and communications with participants/teams, you can use a separate email thread. For example, you may create individual email threads for the teams during the mentoring phase.

Introductory email

• An introductory email should be sent to the participants at most 4 weeks prior to the training. It should include:
  • introduction to the training programme
  • time commitment and expectations
  • links to the training event page
  • links to the pre-training surveys (if applicable)
  • schedule of the training and links to the training (if available)
  • training agenda (if available)
  • reminder about training requirements

Invitation to the live training

• Aside from sending an email containing the links to the live training, it is recommendd to also send a calendar invite (e.g. Google calendar) to the participants and ask them to confirm their attendance on the scheduled training days.

Slack channel

• Participants should be invited to join the Slack as soon as they have confirmed attendance of the training.
• Encourage the use of the Slack channel for asking questions so that everyone may benefit from the answers.
• The slack channel can also be used for sending screenshots during the training.

Other communication channels

The participants may also suggest other communication channels that they would like to use.

What if the participants are unresponsive?

Sometimes participants may become unresponsive to emails and reminders. This is oftentimes unavoidable. However, if this occurs multiple times and becomes a hindrance to the completion of the training programme, you may contact the coordinator from Meta to help you contact the participants and their organizations.

Examples of scenarios when this becomes necessary include:

• When less than 50% of the confirmed participants are present during the start of the live training.
• When less than 50% of the confirmed participants are active during the mentoring phase.