Beyond Scale: How to make your digital development program sustainable

#1

Dear all,

Nice to meet you! DIAL is very excited to announce the publication of a new resource Beyond Scale: How to make your Digital Development Program Sustainable. There are a lot of interesting ideas/themes and potential solutions to help digital development programs scale further and ensure sustainability, especially past the “valley of death”!

Check it out: http://digitalimpactalliance.org/beyondscale/.

Look forward to having a discussion on these topics!

Cheers
W

#2

Really interesting document and I really like the structure, so it allows you to check the section that is relevant to different roles.

I find particularly relevant the way how the report frames the key questions that is going to solve:

  • How might your programme strategy need to change to enable financial sustainability, and how might this affect your organisation?
  • How might your funding or business model need to change to ensure financial sustainability?
  • What new legal, policy or regulatory issues might need to be considered and how might your legal agreements need to change?
  • Do you have the right partner relationships in place to enable scale and sustainability, or are new partnerships required?
  • Do you have the right human capacity to make these strategic changes, or do you need to retrain or hire staff with different skills and experiences?
  • How might you approach to roll out, including everything from technical support and customer care to marketing and distribution, need to change?
  • How might your solution design need to change to enable replication or diversification of your program offering?

Maybe a missing point is how to monitor and mitigate risks so you can fail fast and adapt quickly. Or is this incorporated in the modules?

Best,
Ailin

#3

Welcome to the forum, @Ailin_ODI! Great question - @wameeknoor - how does risk mitigation and “failing fast” come up in the tool?

#4

Thanks @Dustin and @Ailin_ODI , appreciate the positive feedback! As for your question Ailin, monitoring and mitigating risks so you can fail fast and adapt quickly has been incorporated in the guidance offered in each module. It is also central, of course, to your program’s overarching Program Strategy, so we have featured “Identify Risks and Prepare for Change” as one of the four key sections for this chapter. Hope this is helpful! Also, see https://digitalimpactalliance.org/resource-library/, in which we have also provided PDF versions of the eBook broken out by each chapter, as well as a link to the interactive eBook itself.

Cheers
Wameek