Building on common practice and pioneering promising approaches

There are many ways to manage a project. The Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development bases its daily work on existing and thoroughly proven planning documents from Swiss and international organizations. Basically, the foundation uses two inter-related frameworks for project management, the Project Management Cycle (PMC) and the Logical Framework Approach (LFA). This is common practice among international development agencies. These methods and foundation-specific procedures, norms and methods are described in the foundation’s Project Management Handbook.

Besides these more common approaches, the Novartis Foundation has often adopted unconventional methodological approaches:

Social marketing
The Novartis Foundation pioneered the introduction of private-sector concepts of social marketing to change the image of leprosy and thereby reduce the treatment gap in leprosy. Positive results and experiences from leprosy programs in Sri Lanka and India has led the foundation to introduce social marketing into TB and malaria projects as well.

Performance-based funding
There is growing public pressure for development aid that is funded from tax revenue or donations to produce measurable results in the field – performance-based funding is a promising approach to using funding in a more effective way. In 2006, the Novartis Foundation introduced performance-based funding in various of its projects.