Unbabel Community Retrospective 2020: A year to remember!
Join us on a journey down memory lane, looking back at what happened with the Unbabel community in 2020
Before New Year’s Eve of 2020, most of my family and friends were excited about the beginning of a new decade. I spent a lot of time planning my resolutions for the new year, which included: eating healthily and exercising, traveling as much as I could and reading at least one book a month. The only thing I wasn’t expecting is that a pandemic would lock us down in our homes and show us how fragile we are. Well, at least I read a lot of books!
On the other hand, the year for the Unbabel community was very positive. Everyone was a bit worried about the consequences of the pandemic for us, but luckily, we became even stronger. Our community is happier and more engaged. Since I’m a bit obsessed with #tbt trends, I’d like to invite you for a retrospective of 2020 for the Unbabel community. Shall we?
In January, our expectations were still very high and we reached a milestone in the history of Unbabel. We delivered 41,000,000 words! To give you an idea, this number in January 2019 was 25,000,000. That’s what I call growth!
As February arrived, the pandemic started to show its effects in Europe and we felt the need to provide more resources to our editors. That’s why we launched a partnership with SPEAK — Social, a language learning platform that organizes language-learning groups all over the world. Unbabel editors got a 15% discount to join a language group. Raquel wrote an article about them and I wrote one as well, but for their blog. You can check it over here.
The lockdown became very strict in Europe in March, and maybe that’s why this was the month of the year when we had the biggest number of active editors working on the platform. Also, it was the first time the members of the Community team started to work fully remotely. I guess it became easier for us to understand how our editors feel working at home.
April was particularly nice for me because I changed the face of this humble blog, with a small content plan and regular posts! Also, on this month, our editors were incredibly fast to deliver tasks to our customers, it was the best turnaround time of the whole year. Well done, guys! Last, but not least, Hugo Macedo returned to our team as VP of Community.
May was all about engagement and transparency for us. First, we launched our new Knowledge Base, written by our Community Wizard Ben. Another accomplishment this month, a joint effort of our team, was the launch of our Facebook group. We’ve also set up our waitlist for potential editors and introduced the concept of Community Pro to you guys, which is composed of evaluators, terminologists and annotators.
Although we had the launch of our Facebook group in May, it was only in June that we experienced a sign up boom! That’s when we had the biggest growth on it, with editors actively posting and participating. Kudos to our amazing Community Management team, that was in charge of this!
July showed us that numbers matter. We were working to create new resources for our editors so they’ll be engaged and feel part of a community, but what about the results? That’s why we came up with an internal engagement metric to figure out if our efforts were working or not, and of course, to adapt accordingly. We faced another big challenge in July because it was the first time we needed to grow a reverse language pair substantially: Polish to English. I was in charge of this mission, and luckily everything worked out just fine.
Keeping up with our initiative of being more transparent with our editors, in August we decided to launch a poll in our LinkedIn group to have an “Ask Me Anything” for our community. The chosen topic was “the evaluator experience”. As soon as we got the results, Cahid and I were working to make this happen!
September was another huge month for our team. We launched the annual survey to our editors and were able to get some exciting information about you. The objective was to create a content plan for next year and to understand what our community expects from us. We also decided to make an “Ask Me Anything” with our VP of Community, Hugo Macedo, with three short videos in our Facebook group. To end it on a high note, September was the year that our Director of Community, Camila Pohlmann, completed five years at Unbabel. We fondly refer to her as an Unbabel dinosaur!
In October, we got some interesting insights from the survey. You can see some of the results over here. That was also a very special month because our community got a lot of recognition inside the company for the incredible quality we were delivering to our clients. All of the credit goes to our editors!
If the Guinness World Records had a prize for the biggest amount of delivered words in the history of Unbabel, that would certainly happen in November. We reached the mark of 46,000,000 delivered words! Besides that, we posted our “Ask Me Anything” with Ernst, Dutch evaluator, in our Facebook group. This month was also the first time that one editor, Jorge González, wrote an article for our blog. He interviewed me and Raquel about writing in English as a non-native.
Wrapping up the year in the best way possible, in December we brought our community together for an online meet up. It was a success with a lot of panels about quality, artificial intelligence and product developments. We also had the launch of our Unbabel International Holiday Bake Off — I already saw that some of you posted photos of your baked goods on Instagram with the hashtag #UnbabelHolidayBakeOff! Yummy!
What a year! It was very intense, but if there’s one thing that I’m sure of is that you and your words made our lives way better. We sincerely thank you for putting up so much effort into this and we hope we can count on you in 2021. Let’s keep destroying language barriers together! Happy New Year!
