How to turn your idea into an engaging project?
The by far most important resource we have on this planet is our ideas. In fact, all positive change; all progress, starts with an idea. This is how we invented everything from books, to vaccines, to electricity. It is also thanks to an idea that many of us today enjoy the privilege of living in democracies, and an even better idea (which came way too much later) that expanded the right to vote beyond wealthy white men.
However, an idea that stands on its own is worthless. It will wither away and die. In order to take off and carry its positive impact into the world, an idea needs to be shared. It needs to engage and encourage people to take part in its execution.
In this article, I’ll introduce an extremely easy and efficient tool: The Project Planner, for turning your idea into a clearly defined project that will engage people, whether they are volunteers, journalists, investors, or anyone else you want to join in on your idea.
The problem
But first, some theory: in order for your idea or your project to engage, it should meet three criteria. It needs to be important, possible, and relevant. That means you need to show people why it matters, how it can be achieved, and how it relates to their lives. This might sound easy, however, there are a few challenges.
Firstly, when presenting your project, you need to adjust your speech to the listener. What is important to a politician is not necessarily important to a child, and what is relevant for a potential volunteer is not necessarily relevant for a huge investor. You need to speak the language of the listener, and depending on your project, you’re likely to engage with an almost endless number of different groups of people.
The second challenge, is that you interact with all these groups of listeners in a variety of contexts and formats. This could be face to face dialogue, but also through email, videos, posters, funding applications, social media, lectures, and guess what: this list also goes on forever!
The third issue is that, as your project grows and your idea expands, you’ll not be the only one trying to convince the world about the importance of your project. You might have a team, a board, volunteers, participants from your target group, or even politicians and journalists, not as your audience, but as your allies. And all these people need to be able to grasp the essence of your project and pass it on.
So, the reason why it is so difficult to convey the importance, feasibility, and relevance of your project in practice, is that an endless number of people needs to be able to present your project in an endless number of ways to an endless number of audiences, who will probably have an endless number of questions. That’s a lot of endlessness.
The solution
Conveying your message is always going to be one of the biggest challenges of you project. To claim otherwise would be to lie. However, there are solutions. The best is to define your project – and its importance, feasibility and relevance – as clearly and concisely as possible. That’s where the Project Planner comes in.
The Project Planner is short – just one page, in order to force you to focus on the fundamentals. It contains 17 topics or questions that covers pretty much everything people need to know about your project. It takes anywhere between 20 minutes to a few hours to fill in, depending on whether you do this on your own, or with an entire team of talkative colleagues.
The 17 categories are:
1. The name of your project and the slogan if you have one
2. What’s your target group or groups
3. What problem or challenge are you addressing
4. What’s your solution
5. Which activities contribute to this solution
6. What’s unique with the project
7. What are your concrete aims
8. How will your target group take part in shaping the project
9. How will you recruit participants and/ or volunteers
10. Who will you collaborate with and how are the tasks divided
11. Will you need volunteers? What will they do and how are they organized?
12. What’s your capacity for executing this project, why are you the right one for doing this?
13. What’s your budget
14. How will you fund it?
15. What are the potential hurdles and how to overcome them?
16. How will you evaluate the project and measure its social effect
17. And lastly, how will the project be continued or expanded?
If you’re passionate about your idea, you can probably write several pages for each of these questions, but that’s not the point. In fact, the point is to not write a book about your project. Even if you keep it as short as possible – preferably just a sentence or two on each – these 17 categories cover pretty much any aspect of your project. This is true whether you’re making an event for your neighbors, building a new business, or starting a social movement involving millions of people. If your project doesn’t fit all of the categories, you can easily modify them or add your own.
The back side of the project planner comes with a storage space, where you can place all ideas, questions and practical tasks. This is useful, because filling out this project planner is a highly creative process, and is bound to arise quite a few questions, intriguing ideas, and new tasks for your to-do-list. This is gold, especially if you manage to store them for later exploration, instead of letting them lead you astray into long and heated side-discussions.
If you scroll further down in the document, you’ll find the project planner in a different format, but with the same 17 categories. If you fill it in digitally, this format might be better, especially if it is hard to keep all your answers short. Here you have more space and flexibility, but don’t fall for the temptation of writing too much. This format also has explanatory comments and questions to help you thoroughly understand all the 17 categories and how to respond to them.
A last but essential point is that the Project Planner is your internal document. You won’t recruit many participants for your event by pinning it to the school billboard, but you use it to make an awesome poster in no time. It is not the Project Planner you show to potential investors, but it contains all the arguments for your pitch. You’ve probably guessed by now that you don’t send the Project Planner to that journalist, but it serves as the best manuscript in the world, and you have it ready even before you were ever invited to the interview. This not only increases the quality and coherence of your team’s work, but it saves you a massive amount of time.
Conclusion
A few moments’ work and you have defined your project very clearly, making it easy for everyone in your team to understand, and to adjust to different formats and audiences. It will also help answer 95% of all questions people might have about the project. So, filling in the project planner, is one of the best ways to invest in the success of your project. Although nobody sees the project planner itself, it manifests itself in the form of increased quality and efficiency throughout everything you do.
To help you never forget the message of this article, I’m ending with an anecdote: You’ve probably heard people referring to their new company, their organization, or their project as their baby. Feeling that way about your project is often not enough. If you instead manage to inspire other people to feel like your project is their baby too, then you have given your idea a massive boost. After all, it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a village to turn an idea into a project that changes the world.
Good luck!
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