Social projects have changed completely in twenty years: how they are designed, funded, implemented and measured.
If your mental image of a “social project” is from the nineties, that affects your ability to judge where your time or money is worth putting.
Design: co-creation, not proposal
It is no longer enough for the organization to propose the solution.
Current methods require the community to take part in the design from the start. Not out of political correctness: because a project the community does not feel is theirs falls apart the moment the organization leaves.
Implementation: short cycles
Instead of fixed five-year plans, modern projects work in three- to six-month cycles with frequent evaluation points.
That agility lets them respond to what they learn and to what changes around them. The rigidity of older projects condemned them to execute a plan that had gone stale before it finished.
Measurement: change, not deliverables
Activities and deliverables used to be the metric. Today it is behaviour change, capabilities acquired, verifiable improvements in quality of life, and — hardest of all — whether those changes hold.
Tools like theory of change and social return on investment allow the value generated to be quantified with considerably more rigour than before.
Communication: during, not at the end
Contemporary projects document the process as it happens, produce educational material from what they learn, and publish their methods so others can replicate them.
It is the opposite of organizations that only communicated polished results at closing. And it has a useful side effect: a process published while it happens is much harder to dress up.
Funding: diversified and outcome-based
Almost everything used to come from donations or international cooperation. Today it combines public funds, corporate donations, national foundations, cooperation, impact finance and earned income.
The most demanding innovation is outcome-based funding: the funder pays for verified results rather than activities performed. If the committed impact does not happen, the payment is not made in full.
That forces a focus on what works instead of what looks good in a report.
A case with numbers
An urban project to reduce school dropout in an underserved area analysed data to identify which specific factors were driving it. It designed distinct interventions per factor. It worked with families, schools and young people simultaneously. It measured continuously and published what it learned.
Dropout fell from 35% to 8% over five years, and the methodology was replicated in other cities.
What was replicable was not the project. It was the method.
The six questions
To tell whether a project follows current practice:
- Was there genuine co-creation with the community in the design?
- Do they have clear metrics and measure continuously?
- Do they adjust based on what they learn, or execute a fixed plan?
- Do they communicate progress regularly, or only at the end?
- Is their funding diversified?
- Do they work with other actors, or in isolation?
The difference in effectiveness between a project that answers these well and one that does not is enormous, measured as real impact per peso invested.
Keep reading
- How to measure a social project’s impact without fooling yourself
- How to join projects with real impact
- Social impact innovation in Latin America
Question six is Corag’s reason for existing: one open network where several actors coordinate without duplicating records, instead of five isolated systems holding the same thing.
