Design Your Project
Your Community Project—Up and Running!
So, you want to get involved in a community development initiative and start a community project. Great! You have a good idea that has caught the imagination of a group of interested people—two of the essential ingredients for community projects that work. But how do you get from the great idea to the working project? Below, you’ll find a couple of guides that can help you get your idea off the ground and into action. If you need more help with the development of your idea or project, contact us. The Quebec Learners’ Network is here to help you help your community. To see what kinds of projects we support, please click here.
Getting Your Community Project Idea Together
Guide to Planning Your Community-based Project
Getting Your Community Project Idea Together
A guide to project planning which you can adapt to suit your needs.
Outline for Designing a Project:
- Brainstorm strategies that will contribute to reaching your project’s
overall goal (re-define the goal at any point in the rest of the process,
if necessary).
- Do a target-group needs analysis on the group, community, or region
(whichever is appropriate) to determine local conditions affecting the
project.
- Develop objectives that are realistic and attainable under local
conditions (these conditions can include socio-economic variables, seasonal
activities, infrastructural limitations, public awareness, and so on).
- Specify assessment benchmarks that you will use to measure the success
of your project (try to be as concrete as possible; for example: not
“more people using the internet around here”, but “30%
of local households using the Internet to access community information
by the beginning of 2003”).
- Select media that appropriately support the learning approach required by the both project content and the target group’s needs.
Plan the processes and develop or obtain the materials that accurately
reflect the desired learning outcomes.
Target-group Needs Analysis Survey
What are you hoping to achieve with the people who would be affected by your project?
Who is your target group? What specific needs, interests, or capacities do they have that will be served by your project? What would they be doing, once it’s underway? Could it be that you will need to look at an entirely different way of working with people?
Here are some questions to survey with:
- How do the people in your target group currently communicate with one another?
- Is there a consensus on a common agenda?
- Would they agree with the needs you’ve outlined?
- Are they reasonably computer literate?
- What kind of computer/internet access do they have, if any?
- What tasks would they like to accomplish on-line, if they were connected?
- What kind of information would they be interested in sharing/accessing on-line?
- Do they have access to training opportunities and/or technical assistance?
- How much are they willing to spend per month on telecommunications?
- Who else would they want to participate?
What’s THEIR vision for an on-line community?
Sample Needs Analysis check-list
As an example, your target-group may have some of the following needs. Consider which ones are priorities, both to the people and to the project. Add any other needs that apply specifically to your group, and try to rank them in order of priority:
- reduction of travel requirements for a diversely-located group
- easing of schedule demands by providing opportunities for asynchronous participation
- background knowledge and skills to allow people to participate in the project right from the start
- establishment of a shared group atmosphere and encouragement of social interaction
- support for different levels of participants’ technical skill
- consideration of people’s different learning styles
- mastery of several basic information/communications technologies encouragement to explore different ways of doing things.
Guide to Planning Your Community-based Project