Empowered by Data

Chapter TenLessons Learned

#MakeoverMonday has been a labor of love for me and is a project I care greatly about. When I started hosting the project, I put myself into it 100%. My enthusiasm led to a bunch of new ideas, changes, and updates to the projects and helped it grow. It also led to a lot of work for me, which I did in addition to my paid employment, in my spare time. There were plenty of lessons learned: what to do, what not to do; what to do more of, because it helped the community and the individuals within it; and what to do less of, because it exhausted me, took away the joy of running the project, or was simply not the best use of our time.

This chapter shares these lessons in the hope that they will help you avoid some of our mistakes as you embrace ideas and approaches that turned #MakeoverMonday into the successful global project it is.

Let's start with the mistakes I made.

How Not to Do It

The nature of #MakeoverMonday, as a project that runs online, is that we have participants across many time zones, cultures, and languages. If that was not challenging enough, all the interactions are online and mainly through Twitter, where there are limited characters to express yourself. Those two aspects make proper communication very difficult, yet communicating our feedback to the participants is the most valuable part of the project for their understanding, the growth of their skills, and to ensure they come back week after week to practice and improve.

Unsustainable ...