The time has come. You’ve chosen your action project and are ready to begin designing your project – but where do you start?

The first point of call is gathering information. You will need to really understand the challenge faced and the circumstances in which it has arisen in order to propose an effective solution. For example, how can you design a social media campaign if you do not know what platforms are used in Fiji or who the target audience are?

‘Context’ is a broad term and covers many bases. You may want to consider the organisation’s challenge (Action Project) as a contributor to their past-self, present-self and future-self. Asking such questions as ‘How has this arisen?’ and ‘What do we hope to achieve by completing this?’.

On top of this, depending on the project you may need to consider different angles. The 7 Wellness Dimensions of the Healthy Islands initiative are a good place to start – Spiritual, Physical, Social, Environmental, Mental, Financial and Policy.

Use this time to also do some market research – What are some organisations operating in a similar space?Or, facing similar challenges? Consider other countries who’s circumstances may closely reflect that of Fiji’s and your organisation.

Having gained a better understanding for the circumstances surrounding your partner organisation, take some time to identify any potential challenges you will want to take into consideration whilst designing your proposal. This means clarifying the parameters in which you’re working. Here are some things to consider:

• Financial Limitations – Where we don’t always have data on organisational budgets, proposing options that cover a multitude of financial options can be highly effective and give the partner organisations options to consider.
• Social Limitations – What is the current level of understanding of your audience? Here we may also consider cultural norms, how our proposal may impact a community or our audience
• Resource Limitations – Here we will consider the available resources, how connected the organisation or communities may be to access resources along with ‘what capacity do the organisation have to maintain your proposal?’.
• Communication Limitations – With an abundance of remote, rural and island communities Fiji comes with many communication challenges. Where relevant, consider what might be some of the best strategies and the others to avoid in communicating your message and also how the organisation will best engage their target audience.

The value added to our partner organisations is through the range of project proposals from our interns and the different perspectives that have inspired them.

When putting together your proposal, where relevant, you may want to consider an array of options. For example, how might your proposal be delivered with a ‘low cost:high manpower:high resources’ model, or perhaps ‘high cost:low manpower:high resources’; for each Action Project there may be different factors to consider changing beyond the three written here.

This is where you can really excel to our partner organisations and give them the insight they need to understand your proposal.

Having considered multiple options in the previous step, now you will need to draw upon some of the pros and cons of these options. Through having broken down the problem and analysed its context this should put you in a good position to confidently share your vision. It may be that there is no one proposal which you feel is best suited for the partner, in this instance talking through them each and the challenges your foresee alongside their strengths will be all the insight needed for our partner organisations to fully understand and appreciate your proposal.

From business plans to video making, this skills series has been created to support you and maximise your ability to complete your action projects. This skills series has been developed based on the common action project requests from our amazing Fijian partners, and it aims to help you understand your projects better as well as aiding your professional development through additional learning.

We hope the topics covered will give you a better idea of what your project might entail and that they provide you with enough information to inspire you to go off and research each element further.

Feel free to read through as many skills as you want, even if you don’t think it’s directly relevant to your project it could be a bonus skill to enhance your CV!

Click through the different skills below to learn more…