Program Planning and Design

There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears involved in creating a compelling, persuasive and fundable proposal. No wonder nonprofits put a lot of eggs in that basket. At the risk of a ticket from the metaphor police, maybe we need to spend more time caring for the chickens and ensuring that those eggs are well-nourished. A lot of work needs to be done before, and in preparation for, a terrific proposal. These are some of the important elements of the iceberg which lie below the surface.

Seems simple: you prepare and submit a proposal asking for a grant to help support the afterschool program, you get an award letter and a check – then it turns out that you really need the funds to go toward a high school mentoring project that’s run out of money. Well, it’s education, right? Helping kids? Shouldn’t be a big deal?

Good news: the foundation has given you a grant, you’ve spent the money and now it’s time to submit an application for another award. This is an opportunity to create a “new top” for your story—a new headline, a fresh look at the challenges, a record of what’s been done and how that sets you up for what comes next. It’s also a chance to avoid sounding like “here we are again.”

It’s not uncommon: a nonprofit’s program staff or its executive director get excited about funding opportunities and ask the proposal writer or development people “put something together and go after that grant! The XYZ Foundation says it’s interested in what we do, there’s a deadline coming up in a week, so write it up and submit it.”

By definition, most nonprofits are small (99 percent have fewer than 500 employees) and many are very small (median staff size is four employees). We tend to see a small organization’s work as tied to local or regional circumstances and measure its impact in similar terms. We might be missing the big picture.

It’s a deceptively simple idea, really. The people who actually have an experience are the ones who can best talk about it and reveal its impact. In the worlds of grant-seeking and grant-making, it’s becoming more common for funders to emphasize the “lived experience” of applicants or grantees.

An imaginary conversation at a nonprofit: “Hey, we could sure use some new computers and software. And while we’re at it, we ought to see about new office furniture to replace this old junk.” The development person: “OK, I’ll just write a proposal for technology and other equipment.” Off go the proposals and back comes a big handful of rejections. Why, didn’t they see the need?

Traditionally, it wasn't the norm to think in business terms about your nonprofit but it’s a useful exercise because it sharpens your thinking about what you do and how you do it. One element of this kind of thinking is to consider competition—what other agencies or groups or community organizations are working on the same issues, addressing the same problems? This can be an uncomfortable question but what you learn can be valuable in program planning and in submitting proposals.

It’s not likely, but it happens, that a nonprofit wins a grant from a foundation only to discover that the money can’t be used as proposed. Maybe so much time has elapsed between the proposal and the award that the original problem no longer exists. Maybe there are no applicants for the scholarships that have been funded. Maybe community leaders have found another way to deliver services. Perhaps it will take longer than expected to complete the project.