Emotional Bonds

One strategy used by many development initiatives to increase their self-sustainability is to build an emotional bond between their collaborators and the people who benefit or could benefit from their contributions. 

Many initiatives have realized that when their donors, participants and volunteers understand how their contributions can change the lives or circumstances of the people or communities they work with, it is likelier for them to show support and engage. For this reason, many initiatives believe that communicating their objectives and processes clearly and transparently is key, as is sharing the results they have already achieved, and being specific when explaining how everyone can participate and, above all, what kind of impact their contributions could have.

This strategy increases the self-sustainability of some initiatives because it helps them secure existing resources and obtain new ones, which in turn allows them to negotiate their interests more equitably because they do not depend on merely one or a few sources of support. The autonomy they gain by broadening and diversifying their sources of support helps them create more comprehensive and relevant solutions for more people. 

To build these emotional bonds, some initiatives appoint a person or a team in charge of sharing relevant information about the project and its impact on beneficiaries through guided visits to their communities, telephone hotlines, websites, promotional campaigns, portfolios with statistics and testimonials, and so on. In other cases, the information initiatives try to disseminate has to do with the importance of solving their target problem in order to raise awareness and encourage the support of society at large or decision-makers in particular; they do this with photographic exhibitions, documentaries, marches or protests, publications, celebrity support, etc. Others endeavor to create direct and personalized bonds between donors and beneficiaries, which is why they arrange meetings between them to talk about the community’s experiences and to publicly acknowledge and thank donors for their support, or create sponsorship programs where, say, each person can sponsor a specific child to finish his or her education and they can become pen-pals.