Designing the project

Making the case, building the team and managing expectations and risk

Once you have crystallised your purpose, identified your audience, done some research and got stuck into the conversations and the community, it’s time to think about how to structure and develop your project. Your project should be structured in a way that makes it easy for you to concentrate on serving your core purpose – which means giving you the space to work flexibly, respond to your users, and make the most of the assets you have. It also means making sure you don’t run out of resources just as your community starts to take off.

There are various checklists around for what to consider when setting up a new project. Amy suggests you identify:

1. The audience or community you want to engage
2. The resources currently available within you organisation
3. What success looks like
4. What technologies are most appropriate
5. What measures of success can be used

She also suggests using the POST model developed by the Forrester Research Inc: analyse People, Objectives, Strategy and then Technology. Meanwhile Beth Kanter offers a Social Media Strategy Map covering identifying objectives, identifying the audience, integrating, culture change, capacity, tactics and tools, measurement and experimenting.

So there’s a lot out there. Here are a few of our suggestions about how to set up your project to succeed.In addition to having a clear goal, you should have a clear idea of the way that you want to do things. It can be helpful to start by writing down your own project design principles. This should give you something to check back with and ensure that you’re still on track.

Agree your principles

When developing your own principles, you could start by looking at NESTA’s networked innovation principles:

• Start with relationships, not transactions. In social spaces trust may be as important as specific products and services
• Be clear about the invitation. When engaging with people, be explicit about what’s on offer.
• People need to be seen and heard. Recognise and reward what people say and do.
• Follow exciting leads. Leave space for the unexpected
• Let pragmatism dictate the hierarchy. A balance of bottom-up and top-down may be needed.
• Don’t lose the human touch when going to scale. Decrees from on top will not create a sustainable model.

Take time to identify the principles that define your project. Whatever you end up with should embody the spirit of what you are trying to do, and also be in keeping with the values and culture of the community you’re working with. Make them public to audiences and stakeholders and use them as a way to engage people, and reassure them of your intentions. If anything you consider doing later goes against one of your principles, chances are it’s taking you further from what you set out to do.