You have already taken a huge step forward in your sustainability campaign development last week by selecting its general idea and identifying its significance across a variety of global and local contexts. To understand how far along you are on your campaign creation journey, let’s take a minute to learn more about project development and management.  

Project management basics 

A campaign, like any project, can be defined as a series of connected efforts, designed to achieve a desired outcome. This description is closely related to the SMART framework we talked about last week, as a campaign needs a specific and measurable goal that can be reasonably achieved with the time and resources at your disposal. Campaigns are built as a sequence of scheduled events and engagement opportunities that together form a cohesive narrative, relevant to its participants. Now that we know what key considerations go into campaign design, let’s shift our focus to how the design process is organised. That’s where the concept of a project life cycle comes into play.

Project life cycle

It is common to identify 4 or 5 stages in a project life cycle. These stages are:

1. Initiation: coming up with an initial idea and concept for your project
2. Planning: specifying and narrowing down your initial idea, developing project scope and schedule, setting goals and milestones, designing communication and outreach plan
3. Execution and Monitoring (this stage is sometimes broken down into two separate steps): launching the project and tracking its progress against the plan
4. Closure: project evaluation, reporting, using gained insights for future project developments

Watch the video below to consolidate your knowledge on project life cycle and to learn what skills are involved in effective project development.

Project life cycle check-point

Complete a short quiz and submit your responses to VideoAsk questions to test your knowledge of project life cycle.

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