Introducing Byte Size

The new year has just begun, and our team has been hard at work making strides and launching new collaborative projects. We want to keep our community abreast of recent developments to our projects and spotlight the work of our volunteers. Hence, we bring you “Byte Size,” our ongoing blog series to provide quick updates on our projects.

We are proud of the progress of our developers, designers, and data team—and hope you are excited by the work we’re all doing to promote awareness and inspire change in the animal rights movement.

Ensuring quality translation through peer-reviewed feedback

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Vegan Linguists. To make vegan messaging more accessible around the world, we developed a free content translation platform that allows individuals and organizations to submit their content for translation. Likewise, those fluent in multiple languages are able to sign up as volunteers and help become active contributors. 

One of the challenges that arise with any volunteer-driven effort is quality control. To ensure that the translated content is up to standard, Team Sweet Potato has introduced a review system for our volunteer translators. How does it work? Once a translator completes their translation work, other translators will have the opportunity to review and give feedback about the translated content. Reviewers can give feedback about the translated content through edits, comments, and approvals.

Supporting a data-driven approach to outreaching

Last year, our team launched Watch Dominion, which provides easy multi-language access to one of the most well-known and promoted documentaries in the vegan movement, Dominion. Watch Dominion also allows other organizations to seamlessly embed the movie on their own website while collecting watch-time statistics Several organizations, including Anonymous for the Voiceless, DontWatch.org, and Vienna Animal Save, share this project in their outreach.

Team Carrot has worked on the implementation of a stats page, which currently tracks overall traffic, and is working on adding localization (German and French) and improved analytics.

Prioritizing a user-first experience

Veganuary doesn’t just end in January: our very own Vegan Bootcamp is a free 30-day challenge that guides users towards a vegan diet and lifestyle. Its comprehensive content spans 25 subjects which include nutrition, recipes, philosophy, climate, clothing, and more. Each course includes reading material, videos, quizzes, and in some cases, recommended documentaries and events.

As an educational platform, user experience is incredibly important to this project. In addition to Team Banana’s work in enabling social login for easier access, a feedback survey was released to get a sense of user satisfaction, outcomes, and areas for improvement. We found that 62% of users felt satisfied with the platform and have become fully vegan thanks to the challenge (30% reported that they will be transitioning toward a vegan lifestyle).

We’ll be reviewing some feedback to help improve Vegan Bootcamp, but we wanted to share some success stories that we received:

• “I have been trying to go vegan for about a year and two months. I took this course in the last two months, and it was very helpful during my transition and helped me feel confident and knowledgeable.” 

• “Keep up your great work and thank you very much for helping me on this journey! I've learned a lot about veganism and it is wonderful to now see a way of life that I feel more comfortable with living.”

• “Thank you so much for your work on this project. It's really fundamentally changed my identity, the way I see myself as a human. I had toyed with going vegan for a few years but didn't really have enough motivation or courage until I found this site.”

We hope you enjoyed our first edition of this new series. Let us know if there's anything you'd like to learn more about this. Thank you for reading!