Step Four: Document Your Design Strategy

Combine the previous three steps into one project design document that you can use for finding support, informing audiences, gathering more participants, building a team, etc.

To summarise from the sections above, your project design should be concise and clear on:

  • Your story of “Why?” That is, why is it necessary/urgent to build your initiative?
  • What is your theory of change?
  • Who are your (potential) participants?
  • Which audiences does your initiative want to address and how? See Impact Statement.

Before settling on the final design of your initiative, we suggest you also take a look at these 10 questions to answer before filming. This is also a good tool to check if your project is going in the right direction. Your design document should have the answer to almost all of these questions.

Evaluate Your Research and Planning

Visit the Evaluation page to measure your research and planning.

Resources
Exposing the Invisible is a resource for anyone who wants to use digital investigation tools to uncover corruption or rights abuses or to carry out ‘information activism’.

Fledgling Fund is a great resource of impact case studies, some related to research and others relate to different sections of your video for change initiative

School of Data provides useful guides, tips and stories about how to “use data effectively” in order to “create more equitable and effective societies”.

Development, Impact and You (DIY) Toolkit helps users “invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results”. You may specifically like to look at their theory of change worksheets.

Design kit is created by IDEO and aims to help people address real-world needs and problems through collaborations that work to transform data into actionable ideas.

Note-taking and data collection resources

Evernote (available in 20+ language) allows you to scan and photograph documents to add to your research.

Zotero is open source software useful for compiling research referencing lists and making notes on these references.

Bellingcat provides advice and resources to support citizen journalists to collaborate and carry out investigations.

Ushahidi can be useful if you want to support lots of people to geographically map place-based information or reports via the internet or mobile phone.

Survey Monkey allows you to create simple surveys for free, or more elaborate ones for a cost.

Capacity Building