Promotion

Several development initiatives promote their project as a strategy to become more self-sustainable. This allows them to gather new support and helps secure the support they already have. 

The experience of these development initiatives is that when their intervention becomes more visible and their models and innovations are widely disseminated, people are more likely to contribute in different ways: with collaborations, funding, political support, volunteer work, knowledge resources, and so on. So in order to achieve this visibility, they devote efforts or resources to advertise themselves, disseminate what is being done and invite people to participate.

Having diverse sources of support helps an initiative become more self-sustainable because resources in the development field are limited and, sometimes, projects have to adjust their goals and working methods to secure them. Having many sources of support means having less dependence on each one of them individually, which in turn means more equitable grounds to negotiate the initiative’s interests and needs in order to implement solutions that are comprehensive and relevant their context. In addition, promoting the development project may attract the interest of other actors interested in replicating it, which can help an initiative scale up and become relevant to more people. 

Development initiatives have different ways of promoting themselves. Some use social media, others invite celebrities to be project ambassadors with their audiences, others organize or sponsor events such as concerts, festivals, sporting activities, etc. This gives projects a competitive advantage to get more resources because the more people know about the initiative’s work, the likelier it is they will choose to contribute to that specific project. 

According to many initiatives’ experience, having well-defined working models and clearly communicating the ways in which people can support them helps convey the importance of their work and its impact, or even make the case that this initiative’s solutions are better than others and merit support. For this reason, they try to have clear objectives and a systematized model that can be easily communicated (i.e., how the project works, what it has achieved, what it lacks, what impact each contribution will have, etc.). In addition, some initiatives appeal to potential collaborators’ emotions to encourage their support, sometimes using strategies such as showing pictures, videos and testimonials from members of the community they are helping. 

Other initiatives also focus on disseminating information about their target problems to raise awareness among the general public or particular groups of people (such as decision-makers or groups directly affected by their projects) and gain their political support to achieve more fundamental changes; in order to do this, they hold conferences, give talks in schools, organize public demonstrations or advertising campaigns with messages about their causes (care for the environment, respect for certain communities, etc.), and many strategies more.