Announcing UnfinishedImpact: Give your abandoned projects a second chance
What and why?
You probably have a folder or document somewhere on your PC with a bunch of abandoned projects or project ideas that never ended up seeing the light of day. You might have developed a grand vision for this project and imagined how it can save or improve so many people’s lives.
Yet those ideas never materialized due to a lack of time, money, skills, network or the energy to push through. But you might have spent considerable resources on getting this project started and whilst it might not be worthwhile to continue to pursue this project, it seems like a waste to throw it all away.
Introducing Unfinished Impact: a website where you can share your potentially impactful abandoned projects for other people to take over. This way, the impact of your project can still be achieved and the resources you’ve spent on it do not go to waste.
How?
You can share a project simply by clicking the corresponding button on the home page. I recommend sharing as much relevant information as possible whilst submitting your project. You leave some form of contact information as you’re submitting your project. People can then contact you if they want to take over your project. Whether or not you transfer the project to the interested person is up to you to decide. After submission, the project needs to be approved before it’s shown publicly.
Submit your projectSuggestions to find someone to take over your project
You’re thinking about sharing your project and you want it out of the way quickly, but you also want it to succeed. Here are some things you can do that might help your project find someone to take it over:
Give a clear and concise theory of change, and include references where you have them. Make sure no logical steps are missing. Also indicate gaps that you haven’t been able to fill yourself, if they exist.
Describe what your goal and method are. The person taking over the project needs to understand the idea you have in your head well and why you want to do it that way.
Describe what you have already done for the project and what you think still needs to be done to have an MVP.
Explain why you are sharing the project. It might be because you lacked a certain skill or knowledge or were stuck on a problem you couldn’t solve. Explain in detail what the problem was, so someone who’s reading your project knows what skills they should have.
But I will finish this project someday! It’s not abandoned, just archived!
Will you, tho? Have you made a plan and have you dedicated time to it in the near future? Did you work on it in the last year? If the answer to these questions is “no”, then you most likely won’t finish this project someday, and you might as well share it.
Submit your projectFeedback? Comment below!
Thanks to @Bob Jacobs for the valuable feedback on the website and this post
This is a great idea, I just submitted a project. I also wrote it up as a post, but your post was what prompted me to write it :)
Something I tend to find with projects like this[1] is that they can be forgotten about after the initial launch because they’re not a destination site so there is no way for people to naturally come back to them. Have you thought about doing a newsletter or similar with an update on the projects that are added? I think it could be fairly infrequent (monthly) and automated and still be quite useful.
Also some minor feedback: submitting didn’t work initially because of some problem with the description field. I removed a url and some line breaks and then it worked.
i.e. the UnfinishedImpact project, not my idea
Thanks for the comment. I agree with your criticism. It would be nice to have a newsletter similar to how the EA Opportunities Board newsletter works. I decided against that for a few reasons:
The newsletter should indeed be automated, but this increases complexity and initial time investment. This is a time investment I’m currently not able to make.
There needs to be a steady flow of project submissions before such a newsletter makes sense. I found it really hard to guess this, as we tend to only see successful projects posted. Maybe everyone has a folder with 10 abandoned projects and adds new ones every other month, maybe I’m the only one. I’ll maybe re-evaluate this after a month when I’ll have some more time to work on this.
Very reasonable, I think the project is great as is. I just have one more newsletter-related suggestion:
It’s a lot cheaper to collect emails than it is to do the rest of the work related to sending out automated updates, so it could be worth doing that to take advantage of the initial spike in interest (without making any promises as to whether there will be updates). This could just be a link to a google form on the website if you wanted it to be really simple to implement.
Good point. I’m going to do that right away! Edit: You can sign up here.
Love this idea! Even putting it up there might make the person who came up with the idea marginally more likely to do it or at least be involved with doing it too.
Indeed!
Cool! I just submitted a project—minor bit of feedback is that it’s slightly irritating to have the ‘project subtitle’ field be mandatory.
Thanks for the feedback and submitting a project! I’ll make that field non-mandatory when I’m doing some updates :)
Amazing idea!
Where can I see the projects that were submitted?