Executive Summary
Education is pivotal in supporting a child’s growth. Essentially, it is not only important to provide basic education but also to offer quality education. This has for a long time been considered as a key to life and a door to various life opportunities. Unfortunately, in the world with limited opportunities and wide status dichotomies, distribution of and access to resources is not equitable (Arnove, Torres & Franz, 2012). All favor are channeled towards the more privileged wealthy and middle class who can access the various service offered. Contrariwise the less privileged are left to struggle on their own and face the life challenges which sometimes become overwhelming. Undoubtedly, these challenges have a significant impact on education (Arnove, Torres & Franz, 2012). Arguably, receiving a quality education in most parts of the world is considered rather expensive.
In Africa, a third world continent faces significant challenges of providing quality education within limited resource constraints. Moreover, most parents, guardians and school going children are unable to take care of the monetary expenses and demands required to access quality education. Life and natural crises such as civil wars, diseases outbreaks and drought and famine have played a contributory role in reducing various African societies to the knees through pangs of poverty (Mamdani, 2014). As a result, the numbers of disabled families and orphans are on the rise, given the challenges faced in accessing these basic needs-. In Rwanda, for example, the 1993-1994 genocide led to forced exiles, refugees’ statuses, economic decline and poverty (Mamdani, 2014). Most homes were disintegrated leaving orphan or widow led homes. To date, the effect of the genocide is felt. With the backbones of most families destroyed, access to education is limited and a challenging affair to most families. The Mamerte Foundation recognizes the importance of education in child development and in building or rebuilding the national economy. Using a powerful mantra, ‘All Children Deserve Education,’ the foundation aims at raising money to promote local education through improving access.
Project Background
The project aims at creating a multimedia website for Mamerte Foundation to support the foundation’s objectives within four months. Notably, the group relies on a blog to support its educational campaigns. However, the blog is a skeleton, that is, lacking in significant informational details that would appeal to human sympathy and willingness to give to this charity. Therefore, the foundation proves an excellent and timely idea considering the solution it offers but with a weak supporting structure to facilitates its growth by reaching out to more people. With these considerations, a multimedia website with strategic graphical images, video and text content will go a long way in convincing the mass on the projects aims and objective, thus attracting participation and public response (LeCallet & Niebur, 2013). Strategically, for the project to achieve its overall objective, emotional appeal is key. Additionally, the Foundation needs to win public trust that has over time been destroyed by fraudulent charity pretenders attempt to extort money from the public. The multimedia website will use the technological features to reach out to the public, increase appeal and promote the goals of the foundation’s campaign.
Aims and Objectives of the Project
The primary objective of the project is to create a multimedia website that will use multimedia technologies to support the goals of the foundation in attracting charitable contributions in fostering education for the needy child.
The project’s objectives include:
- Creation of a multimedia website to support the foundation’s goals in attracting charity support for education purposes
- Integrating graphic images and video technology with text content functionalities in the website to support the functions
- Integrating social enterprise platforms to the website that would facilitate making various online sales with an aim of using profits to support education
Project Deliverables
Noting project deliverables is key in monitoring project’s progress in relation to the abilities of the implementation meeting the project objectives (Kerzner, 2013). Measuring or monitoring deliverables enhances control in the implementation of the project. Most importantly, it takes note of changes and effectively enhances strategies to control the changes. The project implementation process is four months (120 days) working for five days in a week. In this project, the following are the main deliverables based on the objectives of the project.
The first ten days of the project should achieve laying down the basic structural functionalities including navigation processes of the website. This is important in ensuring that the website infuses a reliable human-computer interface that enhances easy access to the web site pages and functions by the public.
At the end of 30 days, the basic website structure should be up for the first testing. This structure is necessary to depict any changes that can be projected in the development of the website while checking that all the suggested entities and entries of the website functionalities are inclusive.
Atsixty days, the website should have integrated graphical images, videos and text content technologies necessary in promoting the foundation’s goals and objectives. The images, video and text content basically target to narrate the stories of children with educational challenges as well as highlight the successes of the Foundation through the success stories of the beneficiaries of the educational charity funds raised by the foundation.
Seventy days into the project, the social enterprise structures should be up and running. The social enterprise structure targets to allow various companies or individuals to advertise and sell products through the website with an aim of generating to fun the educational goals. Additionally, the social enterprise structure could be used by the foundation to launch products or sell various commodities online with an aim of generating income to support its goals.
The website should be complete by day 100 and subsequently launched into the World Wide Web ready for public access. This deliverable will mark major completion of the project development stages with an aim of using the next 20 days to monitor the websites progress and functionalities, carry out various testing procedures, implementing various changes and training the maintenance and control teams.
Resources
Resources and resource allocations are key for the successful operations of a project. In most cases, projects aim at minimizing resource costs with an aim of controlling allocations and targeting profits optimization (Kerzner, 2013). However, resources allocated need to be appropriate, effective and efficient in accomplishing the project’s goals and objectives.
In the creation of a multimedia website, the main resources are skilled personnel in website designing and testing and experts in video and image technologies (Papaioannou., et al., 2014). Other resources required include full computer systems to allow the accomplishment of the tasks in the implementation procedures. Table 1 below highlights the resources needed in the project implementation process.
| Nature of Resource | Resource | Resource functions Description |
|
Personnel |
2 Web Designers | Working 8hrs a day for 100% of the project period. |
| Video Technologies Expert | Working 8hrs a day for 100% of the project period. | |
| Image Technologies Expert | Working 8hrs a day for 100% of the project period. | |
| Text Content Writer | Working 8hrs a day for 100% of the project period. | |
| Website Analyst | Working 8hrs a day for 30% of the project period | |
| Tester | Working 8hrs a day for 60% of the project period. | |
| Project Manager | Working 6hrs a day for 50% of the project period. | |
| Software | Final Cut Pro | For Video Editing |
| Adobe Photoshop | For Image/Photo editing | |
Table 1: Project Resources
Project Budget
Having identified the resources of the project, it is necessary to allocate each resource a budgetary estimate. This is necessary for resource planning and control of allocations in order to control or limit resource constraints. The project will be broken down into implementation phases. However, allocation of resources is not done according to the phases but instead directly allocated to the resource entity. Table 2 below shows the budgetary estimate for the project. The resource description used for resource personnel indicated in Table 1 above is used to calculate the estimates for these resources.
| Resource | Working Hours | Rate per Hour | Total Allocation |
| Personnel | |||
| 2 Web Designers | 960 hrs each | $70 each | $134,400 |
| Video Technologies Expert | 960hrs | $60 | $57,600 |
| Image Technologies Expert | 960hrs | $60 | $57,600 |
| Text Content Writer | 960hrs | $60 | $57,600 |
| Website Analyst | 288hrs | $40 | $11,520 |
| Tester | 576hrs | $60 | $34,560 |
| Project Manager | 360hrs | $100 | $36,000 |
| Software | |||
| Final Cut Pro | $100 | ||
| Adobe Photoshop | $60 | ||
| Miscellaneous | $10,000 | ||
| Project Totals | $399,440 | ||
Table 2: Project Budget
Notably, there are not additional costs to be incurred by the project. Having in place a team that handles the current blog operations, it is expected that the team will be equipped with enough training regarding the website in the last 20 days of the project, which is catered for in the initial resource allocations.
Key Success Criteria
At the completion of any project, it is important to assure the stakeholders investing or funding the project of the success criteria. In order to gauge these successes, the project requires monitoring and evaluation of the end product of the project against the objectives of the project and the stakeholders’ expectations. As a result, it is significant to ensure strategic efforts and plans are in place to achieve the desired results of the objectives in order to build reputation and attract funding trust in future projects. A successful project is gauged on the prospects to generate a positive outcome and positive return on investment (ROI) (Gido & Clements, 2014). This section examines three major success criteria to be used in measuring the success of the developed multimedia website for Mamerte Foundation.
Firstly, the websites sole target is to use the technologies available in the multimedia website to attract charitable funding to sponsor the education of less privileged children. As a result, the integration of multimedia technologies into the website solely aims to achieve this objective. As such, it is expected that the website will be able to generate charity funds to support the foundation goals. Therefore, to evaluate this success, the foundation shall provide detailed reports after all academic terms detailing on the funds received and used in the education objectives of the foundation. As such, the ability of the website to generate these funds shall be an effective criterion of evaluating the success of the project. Positive or improved outcomes, in this case, would be a positive indicator on the ROI of the project (Sutcliffe & Namoun, 2012). Most importantly, such a trend attracts more support from stakeholders in future organization objectives (Kerzner, 2013).
Secondly, the levels of publicity of the website would be a success indicator of the project. Ideally, websites are aimed at increasing public access through the dissemination of information that would have otherwise been difficult to get to the public (Ohta & Tamura, 2014). The website is targeting to attract donations for education charity targets to reach out to the entire world through internet services and encourage possible donations to a noble course. However, it would be a failure if such investments, as detailed in the budget, would be put into a project that fails to meet this publicity criterion of a website. The system will, therefore, provide an indicator of publicity levels through which the websites access to the public can be monitored to track the success in publicity.
Lastly, feedback responses from the public will be key in determining the success (Kerzner, 2013). While the website may achieve all other goals, it is significantly important to rely on public views and opinions regarding the operations of an organization (Sutcliffe & Namoun, 2012). This feedback may be positive or negative but whichever the case, prove vital in implementing changes and improvements for the success of the project. Most importantly, the majority of positive feedback will indicate the success of the website in achieving its overall goals. The website shall, therefore, integrate a feedback channel through which the public is allowed to interact with the foundation’s team by sending feedback that shall also be presented to the stakeholders to vet the website’s success.
Conclusion
This project proposal aims at creating a multimedia website that would benefit the needy children to access education through attracting donations. The website intends to use multimedia technologies to reach out to the public and emotionally appeal for donations to help needy children in Rwanda gain access to education. The proposal justifies the need for such a system and provides detailed analysis of the importance of such a website in achieving Mamerte Foundation’s goals.
Reference List
Arnove, R. F., Torres, C. A., & Franz, S. (Eds.). (2012). Comparative education: The dialectic of the global and the local. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Gido, J., & Clements, J. (2014). Successful project management. Cengage Learning.
Kerzner, H. R. (2013). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Le Callet, P., & Niebur, E. (2013). Visual attention and applications in multimedia technologies. Proceedings of the IEEE, 101(9), 2058-2067.
Mamdani, M. (2014). When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press.
Ohta, Y., & Tamura, H. (2014). Mixed reality: Merging real and virtual worlds. Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated.
Papaioannou, E., Georgiadis, C. K., Assimakopoulos, C., & Manitsaris, A. (2014). Maximization of users experience in websites: estimating the optimum size of the multimedia content. Electronic Commerce Research, 14(1), 87-109.
Sutcliffe, A., & Namoun, A. (2012). Predicting user attention in complex web pages. Behaviour & Information Technology, 31(7), 679-695.
