All About FDC (First Draft Champions)

Welcome to the First Draft Champions!

And congratulations on passing the First Draft Exam! You have shown yourself to have excellent accuracy, and we hope you enjoy your time with us!

About the Team

First Draft Champions are so named for the two fantastic teams who joined to create this one. First Draft was a subgroup of the established TME special team, created and named for the fledgling First Draft service TM was creating. The Champions of General were a small, close-knit team created to pilot what were then unusually long chunk lengths of four minutes each. Over the course of several months, the two ideas merged and grew together into one team. After a rapid-fire vote for a new name, the First Draft Champions were born!

About the Work

First Draft

While FDC can take on any type of clean verbatim work that needs fast, accurate completion, the team's number one priority is in keeping up with the First Draft service. Just like the name says, First Draft is a service to provide quick, unedited transcripts to the client for a single low price. At transcription, we treat these jobs exactly like any other - clean verbatim, no capital letter at the beginning (except for proper nouns) or punctuation at the end (except to close a bracket). But then, instead of passing through QA, the text is sent directly to the client, and the chunks are edited together by the clients themselves.

Usually, First Draft files will show up in your work history with no percent changed, but just a single dash in the percent field. However, we do have a First Draft Plus program, through which you might see 0.00% changed instead. First Draft Plus files will be sent to a special type of QA called a Stamper after the transcription is complete. The stamper will be adding speaker IDs and timestamps only, but will not be making any changes to the text in most cases. (Hence the "free" 0.00% changed!)

First Draft ASR

We also have another service that our First Draft team provides called First Draft ASR. For these files, you are expected to edit an already existing transcript that will be presented to you. As such, these files are a bit different from the regular First Draft files in their presentation.

When working on one of these files, you will be provided with the full transcript of the job that has been completed by an ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) software. You will then edit the transcript to your usual First Draft standard, making sure that the transcript is accurate and follows our Style Guide. Once you have completed the job, submit it through as normal.

As you will be presented with both of these types of First Draft jobs, it is imperative that you always check every file's Style Guide before beginning so that you know what kind of file you are working on. If you come across a First Draft ASR file that does NOT have text, please send a Help Desk ticket and cancel out of the file.

Punctuation Edits

You will sometimes come across a special type of file called "Punctuation Edits". You as the Transcriber will not do anything differently for these files; however, the Stamper who adds timestamps may make minor adjustments to your text for the sake of consistency. Again, Transcribers treat these jobs as regular First Draft jobs, but you can check out our TM Library Article Punctuation Edits Style for more information on what's involved at the Stamper stage.

More Opportunities

We strive to keep all of our First Draft Champions busy with work available at any time of the day or night! That said, being on additional teams is always a great idea if you are serious about staying active here.

First Draft Champions is not an exclusive membership. This means that you can be a part of other teams in addition to ours! You especially might want to take time to check out the five accent exams (British, Aussie, Kiwi, Scottish, Irish) and the QA or QS Exams when you find yourself with some free time. For more information on additional opportunities and special teams, see TranscribeMe Opportunities.

Team Requirements

There are just two major requirements to stay on the First Draft Champions team: activity and accuracy. For general information about TranscribeMe's policies and requirements, please see TM Basics and Policies.

Activity

We absolutely expect you to stay active on the Jobs tab while you are here; however, we also know that certain seasons of life make that more difficult than others. For that reason, we have a low, flexible minimum requirement to stay on the team: You must do at least 1 job per month.

This requirement includes any job from any team completed on the Transcription tab, but it does NOT include QA sessions or reviews. When work is scarce, we will often be more lenient with this requirement, but we expect that most of the time you will have no trouble meeting or exceeding these guidelines.

If you are unable to meet these requirements for a short period of time, for any reason, then please fill out the Inactivity Notification form to let us know what's going on and when we can expect to see you back to your normal activity.

Accuracy

Before you were added to the First Draft Champions, you passed the First Draft Exam - congratulations! You do awesome work! For the accuracy requirement, we just ask that you keep it up and continue working to improve your craft as you go. We may provide periodic reviews and feedback on your work. If you thoroughly read those reviews and apply the tips within, you'll be all set for accuracy!

If we find that your accuracy has dipped, we may bring you back onto the General team for a short time so that you can benefit from QA changes to each of your jobs. We will then perform an additional review of your work and allow you back on the First Draft team if your accuracy improves.

Note: The admin reviews will be sent directly to your workhub email address, and they will also be made available on your My Account tab of the workhub, under Review History.

Incentives

We love our special teams here at TranscribeMe, and the First Draft Champions are responsible for a huge part of our daily workflow! As such, we have special weekly incentives just for you guys, as our way of saying thank you for all you do to make this team a success!

The Weekly Sweeps include:

• Transcriber of the Week - This weekly award goes to the team member who has processed the highest total number of audio hours on the Transcription tab. This includes jobs for any team, any project. The Transcriber of the Week earns a $15 bonus for their hard work!
• One Runner-Up - Competition can be fierce for Transcriber of the Week! Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades... and First Draft Champions! The first runner-up for Transcriber of the Week will also earn a $15 bonus.
• Weekly Raffle - Even if you can't make the Top Two for the week, your contributions are still vital to our success as a team! For every 30 audio minutes processed, you earn one ticket into the weekly raffle. Random.org will draw a lucky ticket, and the winner gets a $10 bonus! Again, this is 30 audio minutes of any work on the Transcription tab, for any team, any project!
• Honorary Mention - One lucky team member will get a random bonus just for being a member of our excellent team! One team member will be drawn out of all those who completed the required one job for the week, and that person will earn a $10 bonus!

Contest weeks run from Sunday through Saturday, based on the date showing in your Work History (GMT). The award period for increased rates will be one week from the time the winners are announced. Winners are typically announced on Tuesdays, so keep your eyes peeled in the Watercooler group!

Where to Get Help

Watercooler

In TM's Watercooler, you can get answers not only from [TM] staff members, but also from your fellow workers! Questions posted on the Watercooler are public, so others can learn from your answers as well. Remember, if you have a question, odds are good that nine other people are out there wondering the same thing! You can read more about TM Watercooler and where to post your questions in our Watercooler Guide available in TM Library.

Help Desk

Please see our Help Desk article in TM Library for details on submitting a ticket. Note that it is imperative to choose an appropriate dropdown to get the fastest response time for urgent queries. If your query does not pertain to urgent issues regarding an active file, it will go to our Training department instead. Although the Training department tries to answer tickets the day of, please allow at least 3 business days for a response.

Please DO be sure to send a Help Desk ticket ASAP for:

• An accidentally submitted file
• An entirely silent file
• An entirely foreign file

Rejections

If you have a file that you feel was rejected unfairly, please fill out the Rejection Inquiry form to contest it, and you will hear from us via email as soon as possible.

Team Lead: Joieda

If you have a question pertaining to First Draft work, your team member status, questions about pay rates, etc., please send a Help Desk ticket using the "Other" or "Team Query" options, and Joieda or another [TM] will get back to you as soon as possible (within 3 business days). For more information about the fun and friendly [TM]s at TranscribeMe, check out our Who's Who at TM article in TM Library!