Your project in public

Projects need Org plan.

Project updates explains how to write and publish an update. This page is about what happens once one is public: the pages it appears on, how people pass it on, and the things a public page deliberately does not do.

Two switches, not one

Whether the world can see something is decided in two places, and both must allow it.

Setting	Controls
The project’s visibility — private, organisation or public	Whether the project has a public page at all
Each update’s visibility — public, org, members or funders	Whether that update appears on it

A project that is not public has no public page, whatever its updates say: the address simply answers not found. And a public project shows only its public updates. Org, members and funders updates never appear on it.

Updates default to public, so the project setting is the one that usually decides. Changing either setting removes or restores the page, but a public page is briefly cached, so a change can take a couple of minutes to show.

The public project page

A public project has a page of its own at /orgs/<organisation>/projects/<project>. It does not need the organisation to have published an organisation page.

It shows the project’s descriptive facts — Countries, SDGs, Focus areas, Tags and Timeline — plus its Website, Funding programme and Grant reference where set, a Roadmap, and the project’s most recent public updates. Above those sits whatever content you have designed for the page — see Designing the page.

The Roadmap is every milestone in the project. Each shows its title, its status and its dates — start, due and completed. Milestones have no visibility setting of their own, so making the project public publishes all of them, apart from any you have cancelled. Their budget and owner are not shown. Review the milestone list before switching a project to public, in the same way you would review the updates.

The total budget is public

When a project has a budget recorded, its total and currency appear on the public page. Check it before making a project public, particularly where the amount is not something the funder has agreed to publish. Whether a budget is shown is decided by whether one is recorded, so the only way to keep it off a public page is not to record one, or to keep the project non-public.

Designing the page

The public project page is not only fixed facts. A project has its own page builder, and what you build there appears on the public page. It is assembled from blocks:

Block	Use
Rich text	Formatted text, full width or beside an image
Image	A single picture — contained, full width, or floated to either side
Gallery	A set of images in two to four columns, each with an optional caption
Callout	A highlighted panel for the one thing a reader should not miss
Embed	A video from YouTube or Vimeo, a map from OpenStreetMap or Google Maps, or a page from an approved list of other sites
Divider, Spacer	Structure and breathing room

The Embed block puts other people’s content into your page. A visitor has to click to activate it before anything loads from the other site, so opening your page does not by itself send their details to YouTube or Google.

The public update page

Each public update has its own page, at /orgs/<organisation>/projects/<project>/updates/<update>. It shows the caption, the media as a gallery, the link preview if one was captured, the author and the date.

Sharing it

The page carries a Share update menu with a direct route to LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Bluesky and Mastodon, plus Copy link. Each opens that network’s own sharing screen with the update’s address and title already filled in, so nothing is posted until the person confirms it there.

That is passing an update on. It is different from publishing from your organisation’s own accounts, which is covered in Publishing to your own channels.

Every way to pass something on

Sharing is not the same everywhere, and the menu above is not on every public page.

What	How it is shared
A public update	The Share update menu: LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Bluesky, Mastodon, copy link
The public project page	No share menu. Copy the address from the browser and send it
A report	A share link that works without an account. It can be copied and revoked at any time — see Reports
An event	A Share event menu of its own, separate from projects

There is no share-by-email or messaging-app option on any of these. Where you want a message app or email, copy the link and paste it there.

Embedding is not available for projects

A project page cannot be embedded in another website. The platform sends it with a setting that tells browsers not to display it inside someone else’s page, so an embed of it appears blank. The one thing that can be embedded is a member profile, which has a dedicated embed mode. Projects have none, and there is no embed code to copy.

What you can do instead is link to the project page from your own site, or use the Embed block the other way round — to bring a video or map into the project page.

What it looks like when it is shared

When a link is pasted into a chat, an email or a social post, the preview is built from the update: the title, the opening of the caption, and an image — the update’s featured image, or its first picture if none is set. An update with no media falls back to the platform’s general share image, so it still previews, but as a generic card rather than as your project — worth attaching a picture to any update you expect to be shared.

The page also describes itself to search engines as an article, naming the author, the date and your organisation as publisher, so a public update can be found and quoted properly.

What a public page does not have

No comments, reactions or follow button. The page is for reading and passing on. Conversation happens elsewhere.

No RSS or subscription feed for a project. The platform publishes a feed of recent members and nothing equivalent for projects. Someone who wants to follow your project has to come back, or you have to publish elsewhere.

It is not listed in the platform’s sitemap, so search engines find a public update only by following a link to it — from your website, from a share, or from another page. If discoverability matters, link to the project page from your own site.

Older updates may stop resolving. An update’s page is found by looking through the project’s 50 most recent public updates. On a project with more than that, the address of an older update can answer not found even though the update still exists. Nothing on the page tells the reader why. If you rely on a long-lived link to a specific update, copy it while it is recent or republish the content somewhere permanent.

Sending something to one person

None of the above is right for “I want this specific person to see this without making it public”. For that, use a report’s share link — a link to one report that works without an account. See Reports, including the caution that such a link has no expiry: the link is the permission.

To reach your funders without publishing anything, set an update’s visibility to funders instead.