Demonstrating Potential Impact

A strategy used by several development projects to increase their self-sustainability is to show potential donors, beneficiaries, volunteers or collaborators what the impact of the project could be, or what might be achieved with each of their specific contributions. 

This is a transparency and communication strategy used by many initiatives to attract new sources of funding, secure existing ones and get new collaborations and engagement of all kinds. It is all about explaining how anyone can support the project, and how each contribution could help solve important development problems and impact the lives of beneficiaries (for each donation of a certain amount, for example, we can send a child to school for a year). This allows the different sources of support to understand, envision and realize what the initiative will do with their resources, which is a key incentive for cooperation since this information builds trust from existing donors and from internal or external collaborators, and can help attract new collaborations and donations as well.  

This is an important strategy for self-sustainability because there is a lot of distrust and apathy in the development field, and money is often scarce and difficult to compete for. That is why some projects try to differentiate themselves from others and do everything in their power to attract as many varied sources of support as they can, so as not to depend on merely one or a few. Explaining how everyone can contribute and what the effect of each contribution could be is often a good way to support this goal. 

Some development initiatives find that a very well-systematized development model helps show beneficiary communities, volunteers, donors or other people or initiatives the impact that their participation and contributions could have, because this allows them to communicate what their goals are, what their capacity is to meet them and what their estimated timelines are, as well as to be clear on what resources they have, what their short and long term plans are, what difficulties they might face, and so on. Others promote their work and results with pilot projects, exhibitions, documentaries, publications or publicity campaigns, thus gaining the trust of potential donors who may be motivated to participate after seeing the work that has been done and the goals that have already been achieved. Some other initiatives also decide to build an emotional bond between collaborators and beneficiary communities by showing photographs of the beneficiaries, organizing pen-pal programs between them and the collaborators or perhaps putting a sponsorship system together, so that each participant is very clear about the direct impact they are having or could have on the lives of specific people. Still other projects show participants what personal benefits they could get from contributing, such as brand visibility (putting a logo on a school, hospital or library, for example, or adding the donor company’s name to the list of sponsors, etc.).