We are excited to announce our newest offering, Amara Community. With Youtube Community Contributions scheduled to retire on September 28, 2020, Amara Community is a powerful alternative for Youtube creators. 

Since 2010, Amara has been a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating technologies, services, and communities that ensure a more collaborative, inclusive world. We are proud to provide Amara Community as an effective and unique team environment for crowd-sourced contributions that make video content more accessible worldwide!

Connect with your contributors through Amara Community’s controlled workspace:

• Decide who can join your team
• Choose which subtitle languages you want
• Create custom messages for your contributors
• Improve quality with subtitle review

Start your Amara Community in a few simple steps:

• Create your team
• Connect your YouTube channel
• Select your subtitle languages
• Add team members

Create your team

If you don’t have an Amara user account already, you will need to sign up before you can create a team.

Choose your team name

Choose a team name that is familiar to your community so that your contributors can easily find you on Amara.

Seats and languages

Choose how many seats and languages fit your contributor community. If you choose 25 seats, then you and 24 other people can join your team and contribute subtitles: 

Amara Community plans come with at least 25 seats and at least 5 languages. You can choose to start with more seats and languages or upgrade your plan later. Your Amara Community plan renews every 3 months and you can cancel at any time.

During the signup process, you can add one YouTube channel and set your subtitle languages. If you skipped these steps and need to complete them after you sign up, read on below to learn more.

Add your YouTube channel

Make sure that the videos that you want to add to your Amara Community are public and embeddable before adding your YouTube channel. Go to Settings > YouTube Channel and click the Add YouTube Channel button. And then add the channel that you want to connect to Amara. 

After you add a YouTube channel, public videos on that channel will be added to your Amara Community team. View all videos on your team’s Videos page.  If you have a lot of videos, allow at least 15 minutes for all of them to show up in your team. Contact us at yt-communitysupport@amara.org if you have issues seeing videos on your team!

Note: If an Amara user has already added one of your videos to the Amara Public Workspace, that video will not automatically show up on your Amara Community team after you connect your YouTube channel. 

Set your subtitle languages

You have to set at least one subtitle language before team members can create community contributions for your videos. You do not have to set all of your languages to get started. Go to your team’s Settings page to select your languages.

Be careful before setting your languages, because you cannot change your languages after you select and save them unless you change your plan. Contact us at yt-communitysupport@amara.org if you need assistance.

Customize your team

Go to Settings > Community Description/Messages to start customizing your Amara Community. Customize your welcome page and more:

• Add some style with a team logo and banner
• Add custom messages to welcome new members

Give your team members a chance to catch mistakes before subtitles reach your audience. In the Settings > Subtitle Workflow page, you can add a review step to your workflow. This means that a second contributor has to review subtitles before they export to YouTube.

Check out these simple subtitling guidelines to help your team create quality subtitles through collaboration, readability, and an audience-first focus. You can add guidelines for transcription and translation in Settings > Subtitle Guidelines that your team can view in the Amara Editor.

Get contributors to join your team

Go to your team’s Settings > Team Admission page to choose how you want your contributors to join your team. The “Application” option is a great way to encourage contributors to join your team. Then you can decide who to accept or reject.

Share a link to your Amara Community welcome page

Share a link to your welcome page with your YouTube subscribers and invite them to join Amara and apply to your Amara Community:

• Copy the link to your welcome page in Settings > Team Admission
• Share your welcome page with your YouTube subscribers
• Review applications on the Members tab
• Accept or reject incoming applications

Explore your Amara Community

After you set up your Amara Community, your team members can start creating community contributions. When the subtitles are “Complete,” they will export to the YouTube channel connected through your team’s Settings page.

Any team member can start subtitles by clicking the Transcribe or Translate button under a video on the team Dashboard:

Learn more about what you can do with Amara Community:

• Advanced settings and permissions
• Quality assurance and subtitle guidelines
• Organize your videos into projects
• Subtitle ordering
• Upgrading your plan

The Amara platform and award-winning subtitle editor is used by volunteer communities like TED, Captions Requested, WikiTongues, and many others. By creating subtitles for your content, your Amara Community team members can expand your audience:

• Subtitles boost SEO to help users find you
• Videos with subtitles are also more likely to get shared
• Translated subtitles attract subscribers in different languages
• Same-language subtitles make videos accessible to the millions of Deaf and Hard of hearing people in the world

If you have any issues or questions with your Amara Community team, contact us at yt-communitysupport@amara.org. 

If you want even more workflow and visibility options, more flexibility with team roles, or connecting more than one YouTube Channel, please contact us at yt-enterprise@amara.org.