Learn How to Create a Social Project.
The Social Project Compass is a tool specifically designed to help you create social projects. Social change can often be an unpredictable journey. This tool gives your project the flexibility and resilience of navigating social change. The compass is designed to help you adapt your project, responding to maintain momentum and maximise social impact.
Create a Social Project Management Journey of Change
Managing a social project is a journey that requires careful navigation. In order to be successful and make a meaningful impact in your community. Traditional project management processes were designed for software, IT and manufacturing. As such they follow rigid processes that often do not fit and adapt to the ebb and flow of the real world of people. That’s where the social project compass comes in.
The Social Project Compass Guiding You to Create Social Projects
The social project compass is a framework that helps guide you through a social project. Rather than emphasising compliance to rigid processes that may not meet your needs. The compass puts your vision, community and resources at the heart of the model, then enables you to choose and adapt your approach to the situation. Prioritising and revisiting what most needs to be done based on your current situation. The social world is in constant change so your project will need to adapt to be successful. A rigid project will break. A flexible project will adapt. The compass is designed to help you adapt your project to maintain momentum and maximise social impact.
Create A Core to Your Social Project.
The social project compass has 3 parts at the centre, which is the practical lens you should view all your decisions by. The intention that all the decisions of your project should be guided by your vision, the community and the practicalities of the resources that fuel your project.
Create an Inspiring Vision for Your Social Project:
The first step in any social project is to define a compelling vision. This should be a vision that inspires and motivates you, your team, key stakeholders and one that resonates with your target community. This vision will serve as your sense of direction guiding you through the journey of your project.
Enroll a Community To Create Your Social Project.
A successful social project requires the support and participation of a diverse group of stakeholders. This includes community members, volunteers, donors, and other organizations. Enrolling a community means building relationships, engaging in dialogue, and creating a shared sense of purpose. This helps to ensure that your project is grounded in the needs and priorities of your community. If you are unable to enrol key people in your cause you probably need to revisit your vision to better meet their needs.
Manage Your Resources:
As you navigate the journey of your project, it’s important to understand what resources you have to manage your resources effectively. This includes financial resources, as well as people, such as volunteers and staff. But very importantly it also means the skills knowledge and experience at your disposal. Where resources are scarce, creativity and innovation can often come to your rescue. Focus on your strengths building a project around the wonderful skills, strengths and experience you have at your disposal. Your resources are very much the fuel for your journey so keep an eye on them.
Beyond the Core
Once you have clarity at the core of your project you can then look to the outside of the compass. There is no right order to approach this, as your priority is to respond to the needs of the environment. However, a clockwise progression from the top is often a good natural flow to building momentum on the project.
Identify Patterns and Stories:
For social projects this is measurement. A core aspect of social projects are that they require numbers and interpretation. What Nora Bateson describes as ‘warm data’. As well as capturing the experience of those involved which usually cannot reliably be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. Social projects have meaning. Therefore you need to pay attention to the patterns and stories that emerge from your work. These can provide valuable insights into the needs and experiences of your target community, as well as potential solutions to the challenges you are addressing. This helps to inform your decision-making and ensure that your project is responsive to the changing needs of your community.
Set Strategy and Intentions:
Once you have a clear understanding of your vision and the needs of your community, as well as the practical challenges and opportunities of making it happen. It’s time to set strategy and intentions for your project. This means determining your goals, objectives, and action plan. This helps to ensure that you are working towards a clear set of outcomes (not outputs) and making progress toward your vision. It’s very important you should review this if something changes to make the plan impractical or risks exhausting your resources. (Too often people try to adapt the world to fit the strategy, rather than the other way around).
Establish Principles and a Plan:
Establishing principles and a plan helps ensure that your project is grounded in values and that you are working towards a clear set of outcomes. It’s important to be flexible and adaptable, but having a plan in place helps keep you focused and on track, as you navigate the journey of your project. Having a plan also helps you anticipate problems and plan for contingencies.
Tackle Issues With Creativity and Problem Solving:
Social projects often involve complex and challenging issues. It’s important to approach these issues with creativity and a problem-solving mentality. This may involve finding new and innovative solutions, or using tried and tested methods in new ways. This helps to ensure that you are able to overcome obstacles and move forward with your project. BEWARE: Being creative can be much harder than it sounds. Most people simply go with the first viable idea that comes to mind. (Recency (availability) bias) Getting people stuck in decision making loops and recreating old problems.
Adapt and Innovate Your Work:
I view innovation and adaptation as putting creativity into practice, through testing improvement, and learning. As you progress through your project, it’s important to be open to new ideas and approaches. This means being willing to adapt and innovate your work as needed to better meet the needs of your community. This helps to ensure that your project remains relevant and responsive to the changing needs of your community.
Master the Craft to Build Your Expertise:
Managing a social project requires a wide range of skills and knowledge. It’s important to continue learning and developing your expertise in order to be effective and make a lasting impact. This helps to ensure that you are able to navigate the journey of your project with confidence and effectiveness. As well as use your hard won expertise to address new problems as they come along.
Focus on Efficiency and Structure:
Gradually, things settle and you start making progress and getting reliable results. At this point it is important to focus on efficiency and structure in your work to enable scaling and sustainability. This means being organised, setting clear expectations, and establishing systems and processes that help you and your team work effectively and efficiently.
Review and Refine Your Work:
You will need to review your work throughout. But particularly as you near the end of your project being established, it’s important to set aside take time to review and reflect on your work. Did you achieve your outcomes? (Not just outputs.) Could you have done things differently? This includes looking back at your original vision and goals, and considering what worked well and what could be improved upon in the future.
An Example of Creating a Social Project.
I literally wrote this example in 5 mins with a random example from the top of my head. To prove it can be done pretty simply. (So these are rough notes)
If I were to create a project to give people who were struggling to find work training in a skill e.g. coding. To help them find a job.
Social Project Management Core activities:
- An inspiring vision. – Gain skills so that you can make the machine do the job for you and earn money doing it.
- Engaging a community. – I’d speak to people who were out of work, who were interested in technology/gaming, and work with them to coproduce a course that meets their needs. Then get them to review the course at each stage.
- Managing resources. – I’d look to what resources I and the community have access to. Maybe noone has access to computers. So maybe I would look to use libraries or ask education facilities if we could rent a room.
The Way These Tasks Are Carried Out Will Depend On The Context….
- Measurement. (Data patterns and stories) – How many people engaged completed the course? Got a job? What type of job? How that changed over time. As well as people’s personal feedback and experience
- Creating a strategy. – E.g. identifying where the interests and knowledge of the community overlapped with local employers’ needs. Also maybe looking to get a company to take apprentices so that people could get used to employment again.
- Project and planning and boundary setting. – What are the steps to putting the course together? How do we run classes and training? Put together a timed plan. We need to define who we target. Maybe setting a maximum length (and cost) of each course would help decide what to be taught.
- Creativity and problem-solving. – Maybe people find the language of the course materials too technical so instead, we use simpler language and more worked examples.
- Adapting your project. – Maybe we find that other employers want different skills. How can we change our current content to meet their requirements?
- Building expertise.– Over time we want to get better at training people. So we choose to have to people run the course and coach one another to gain insight into how we can improve.
- Improving efficiency and process. – We may find that trainees often have a particular set of problems. So we create course materials they can take away with them which means they spend less time asking for help in class on common problems.
- Review and refine your project for scale and adoption. – Were the people more likely to find work after our course vs people who didn’t do it? What are the mistakes we made? What did we learn? What are the essentials that made this course effective, that someone else doing the same work would want to know.
Creating a Social Project Does Not Have to be Hard.
The above example was just a basic example. Yes there are a lot of things to consider in creating social projects. If you would like to learn more please check out my complete guide to social projects. Creating social projects does not have to be hard. You don’t need to do all the steps to do a social project. The steps are there to help prompt you so you can respond to the situation and challenges at hand. The difficulty with social projects is that they can be unpredictable. Because people are unpredictable. By being adaptive and responsive to the challenges you can respond quickly in a structured way to each of the problems that come your way. Over time you build knowledge, expertise experience and judgement. You will get better at it with practice. If you have any questions I’m here to help.
Social Project Funding
You may have a great idea for a social project, but frequently getting funding is the main obstacle to getting up and running. Gaining funding is usually a competitive process so it’s important to do everything you can to get ahead. I’ve created a guide to social project funding as well as a test to help you understand where your bid is at ass well as you what to do next. Finally, I offer a consulting service to help you get ahead.
Summary
The social project compass is a framework designed to help you navigate the unpredictable journey of creating and managing social projects. The compass prioritizes the vision, community, and resources at the heart of the model, allowing for flexibility and adaptability to the constantly changing social world. The social project compass is a practical framework designed to give you answers and direction to help guide social projects towards success, scaling and maximising your social impact.
Learn to create change that flows: Discover more at edgeofpossible.com
Other relevant articles:
Social Projects: A Complete Guide.
The Web of Stakeholder Engagement
What is the Best Leadership Style for Great Social Projects?
The Hierarchy Of Social Intervention
What is Social Innovation? The Unpredictable, Beautiful Truth.