Eng. Mousa Al-Mousa

For non-profit programs and projects to mature, we need 3 essential components: there must be a real need, a feasibility study, and achieving sustainability, as many programs and projects that lack these three fundamental components are highly susceptible to failure.

The word maturation means that we have a project ready for harvest and consumption. Our mature project has surpassed the growth stage and has reached the stage of completion, ripeness, and readiness. Thus, maturing the idea means that it has gone through its cycle and emerged after careful consideration and study, with its features and details clarified precisely.

You can judge whether your idea is mature or not by ensuring that every question that might be directed at your idea has a sufficient and comprehensive written answer and is not just in your mind.

The Abdulrahman bin Saleh Al-Rajhi and Family Charitable Foundation has a specific concept of maturation, which is:

"A planned process within a time frame preceding the establishment stage, during which the feasibility of the proposed idea is studied, the best practices in its field are reviewed, and the voice of the client and expert is listened to, in order to arrive at a complete, comprehensive, and clear vision that enables it as a donor to make the appropriate decision regarding the funding of the project or not, while equipping project stakeholders with the necessary tools and components for project success and a compass for the direction to move in."

The application of maturation applies to innovative and new projects or projects that have been previously executed but did not achieve the anticipated change and impact.

Maturation has 4 essential pillars:

1- Listening to the voice of the beneficiary, client, and expert.

2- Reviewing the best practices and experiences.

3- Achieving project sustainability.

4- Cross-fertilization of ideas and building the team's vision.

Here, we may ask, what is the goal of maturation?!

The answer is that maturation develops the idea owner, specifies the common vision, builds the team, decides whether to participate in funding or not, in addition to gaining matured projects partnerships, identifying consultants and workers in the project's field, and finally building indicators for project success that make measuring it easy and feasible.

You can achieve maturation for your project by following these 11 steps:

1- Define the idea.

2- Form a maturation working team.

3- Set maturation goals.

4- Conduct a focus group before visits and meetings, and hold workshops to build and enrich the steps for maturation.

5- Visit similar entities and explore their successful and unsuccessful experiences and practices to benefit from them.

6- Meet with experts and specialists.

7- Meet with a sample of the target group benefiting from the project or initiative.

8- Conduct a workshop for at least 15 people from various demographics and perspectives to exchange ideas and receive feedback.

9- Conduct a focus group to create a roadmap for the maturation document and establish recommendations.

10- Issue a project document attached with recommendations and the most important digital sources upon which the maturation document was founded.

11- Issue a knowledge document for the project to benefit other organizations and workers in the non-profit sector from similar organizations.

We do not deny at the end of this article that we face certain challenges, the most important of which are: the lack of conviction of the importance of maturation, the considerable effort it requires, along with the potential for programs and projects to escape and be lost, and the last challenge is the involvement of those who mature ideas in execution!

This article was edited by the Third Bank team, as part of a training course by Eng. Mousa Al-Mousa titled: Maturation of Projects for Charitable Entities, and you can access it through the link:

https://www.sdeem.org/دورة/إنضاج-المشاريع-للجهات-الخيرية-2448