Two Minutes Tuesday #8 How you will select and involve participants in the different activities of your project

In this article we will provide you with an overview on how to fill in the section dedicated to the selection and involvement of the participants in different activities of your project.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, you should define who the participants of your project are. We can consider as participants all the individuals involved in the project, from the project staff to the people reached through the dissemination activities.

This category varies depending on the context/sector in which you intend to operate, and on the objectives addressed by the project, so it is different from project to project. 

We assume that, before writing the project proposal, you have already contacted all of the project partners and they have selected the most skilled staff persons to be involved in the project, based on the project topic. This is fundamental to assess the resources you have for implementing your project. You should describe the tools, activities and criteria used for selecting and involving the project staff. You could also have defined a common procedure and selection criteria for all the partners, to guarantee the same prerequisites and basic competences.

After identifying the project staff, you should be clear who the other participants are that will take part in your project. 

You can use different approaches to do this.

The one we are using is to identify the other participants into different groups of individuals and organisations that will be involved in the future phases and activities of the project, as follows:

• primary target group
• final beneficiaries
• stakeholders
• external evaluators
• etc…

Then, we describe the selection criteria (1) and the procedure (2) that we have used.

1. The criteria are based on the activities in which they will be involved (i.e. if we plan to involve stakeholders in a transnational network related to the project they must have: a) interest in developing competences and share experiences on the project topic b) interest in discover experiences and points of view of individual coming from other countries or c) the possibility to support the network with their work..etc)…

2. The methodologies used can be different and may vary from specific activities foreseen for the creation of the results (i.e. questionnaire, focus groups, etc..) to procedure for informing the participants (meetings, open discussions, etc…) and assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the materials produced (interview, test, observation, etc…)

At the end, you should provide a realistic and detailed picture of the people and organisations involved in the activities, which in different ways will help you to reach your project results.