Project Officer and volunteers brainstorming after a beach clean up.
Samuel Ramkalawan.
Project Design & Initiation
Project Officer and SIF team brainstorming.
Seychelles Islands Foundation.
Before beginning to approach potential funders it was necessarily to carefully plan and design the project and anticipate all the information that funders would wish to know. This includes the project aims and outputs, the team involved, the logistical plan and the budget. It is also important to clearly think about how the project will have a lasting legacy beyond the clean-up expedition. This should be developed into a full written project proposal.
Following completion of the project design it is necessary to set-up project media sites, this also required developing a project logo, title and tag line. We also set-up specific project email addresses. The media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & project website) all required initial content and therefore a photo library was compiled and content text established. Before launching the project we also completed team recruitment (12 team volunteers in total) and allocated specific team roles for the duration of the project, for example, social media officer, outreach officer, science officer. With this now in place it was possible to plan a fundraising strategy.
The project design required high levels of communication between the team In Oxford, The Seychelles Islands Foundation and the staff on Aldabra Atoll. This was to ensure the project fulfilled the overall aims and was financially and logistically feasible.
Having multiple persons working on the project development is beneficial but to ensure cohesion of ideas it is necessary to have regular meetings and to review the project development at each stage thus reducing the likelihood that key considerations will be missed.