Imagine you’re planning your reuse scheme and you’ve already got the go-ahead from stakeholders, done a business case, and have organisational support, but, there’s a delay.

Nobody likes delays, such as the IT department taking longer than expected to review something, or a line manager or committee going over details again and again. Regardless of the delay, you know the project is going to go ahead and you are itching to get started. If you’re at this stage in the process, or could perceive it ever happening to you, then you must continue reading.

The first actions to take

Right at the start, you need to bring together your implementation team to develop and organise a mini-pilot that will stress test and trial the system. What you can do during this aforementioned period of inactivity is to get together the volunteers, the guinea pigs, the willing supporters, or the green champions, and get them to participate.

You can double your buzz by sending out a message to your stakeholders and say ‘We are commissioning the Warp It service to set up a reuse system, but we need some help testing it out.’ If you create a limited number of spaces for this Beta test, you can create the illusion of scarcity and this is the first step towards creating a buzz.

What to say in this message…

“Hey [insert name], we have 30 spaces for the mini-pilot of our brand new reuse system, Warp It. This service is going to bring many benefits, but we need to do a trial to see how it will function in our organisation. We are inviting you to be a part of this trial, but act quick, because interest is high and space is limited”.

After you send out this email you are going to receive a flurry of interest, and whether you get 30 people or not, you will have enough participants to run this pilot while you wait for the go-ahead to roll out the full version of the program.

What to do afterwards

The secondary benefit of inviting all of the relevant stakeholders onto the pilot is that if they don’t know about Warp It, or the proposed reuse system, this is a great opportunity to let them know and it will create a word of mouth movement in the organisation.

Expectations will start to grow and you will start to build a small network of keen volunteers to test and provide feedback. The result of this is free publicity.

Take that buzz and use it for the launch of your fully-fledged reuse programme once it is ready. 

There's a lot you can do with a good buzz!