No one cares about our projects.
It’s true, they don’t. All they care about is if and how what we are offering can solve a pressing problem for them.
In building any new initiative, we need to ensure it creates enough outputs that compensate people for the required inputs, socially and economically. If that is not there, whatever you are trying to do will fail to draw enough engagement, investment and support to succeed. Convincing people to get involved boils down to having credible answers to two questions:
A. What is it prospective participants and strategic partners really want to achieve and how can the initiative help them do so?
B. What are quick, easy deliverables that will produce what feel like tangible results for the participants and partners respectively, and that we can give them very early on in the initiative?
This is where we need to start in the relationship development process if we are to engage people who are stretched thin for time (and money) in working with us on any initiative. So how do we answer these questions? We propose the following process:
1. Pick an issue and form a team of individuals who want to build opportunities to work on it together. People want to know who they are dealing with and what makes them credible…as well as what issues/ topics are in focus. In the context of #LOTE5 this would mean we ought to have a short description of the topic/issue + short bios for the people driving it up on the minisite already. Same goes for OpenCare, we need a number of options for how people can contribute to the project ranging from sharing important questions they want answered about care…to developing new OpenCare products and services.
2. Offer up a point of view about the issues and options that galvanizes reactions. We surface participants and partners by publishing high quality, engaging posts on a regular basis and making sure they reach far and wide (goal: 10k readers/post). We need to come away having learned something new about the issue we care about. Check out this post on Greece’s zero-cash shadow healthcare system as an example.
3. Follow up by contacting people who show interest in posts/presentations and invite them to a call/coffee. What did they think about your presentation or post? What is a problem statement that is relevant to them/their work? What potential endstate benefits do they see for themselves/own organisations and what are they losing by not exploring this? If they are interested and it feels like they have something to contribute follow up by inviting them to relevant events and asking them to pick a role (host, speak, reach out and invite others). Want to set one up but unsure how? let’s talk- it’s a lot easier than you think, and A LOT of fun 
4. Offer intimate spaces for networking and personalised channels for sense-making. Give the prospective participants and partners a sense of what it’s like to work together, inviting them to Informal events like this one. Invite them to present issues they are working on, and get fresh perspectives from other participants (limit it to one short presentation per event).
Want to learn more about how to do this in practice and develop new skills? Join one or more LOTE5 teams - we’ll teach you what we have learned while we build this fifth edition of our annual event together.
Starting is easy: Sign in to Edgeryders.eu and write your own personalised invitation to LOTE5 here: https://edgeryders.eu/en/lote5/task-5539
Once you do this we will get in touch to discuss your personal learning objectives and which #lote5 tasks can help you meet them.