Electronically Signed NGO Project Proposal Template Made Easy

Signed electronically ngo project proposal template

welcome everyone across the world to today's presentation on five tips for great proposals one of the many useful trainings offered by funds for NGOs org help you succeed in fundraising as you know funds for NGOs org is one of the best sources of NGO funding information on the web please be sure to sign up and subscribe to funds for NGOs email funding alerts I'm Megan Eric a lien from Phil Entropia in New York and allow me to introduce our trainer Eric Decker well thanks Megan and welcome everyone and we both Megan and I work for Phil and Joe p.m. it's a consulting firm based in New York that works with NGOs around the world to help them successfully fundraise and over the years I've developed hundreds of proposals and over time I've gotten much better at it and through trial and error and many of been successful so today I'm going to share some of my experience and I will share five tips on creating great proposals with you all to see schedule of upcoming webinars please visit webinars dot funds for NGOs or more information and here's our first tip understand the problem it's very interesting Eric can you explain yeah this is very important because I think to develop a good proposal we have to really understand the problem in there's two reasons for for this the first reason is because we it helps us define the activities the strategy require to that we need to solve the problem but more importantly in some ways it we can make sure if we understand the problem that it is a problem the donor wants to solve so for example in this picture you see four girls and they're working they're carrying wood and so the problem is maybe child labor girls are working and the effect is that they're not going to school and they might be exploited but what is the underlying cause of a problem like this well it could be gender discrimination as you can see these are all girls maybe the boys are in school so to deal with this problem you would focus your your program and thus your proposal on maybe gender discrimination or girls education things like that so and we want to make absolutely sure that the donor is interested in the problem if a dollar has a grant available for environment or global warming then we don't want to show up with a proposal that deals with child labor or gender issues in most cases I want to make sure it's a good fit they have money to spend to solve a problem we want to make sure we are solving that problem for them so tip number two define specific activities yeah that's also very important and here's an example for example parents no longer use girls for for child labor and the activity in our proposal could read organized training for five to ten local people well this is not what you want to do you want to make the activity as specific as possible for example in the next slide a better activity and a more specific one would be organize a one-week training to train 10 local advocates in advocacy techniques because if the if the activity is very specific it will be very easy to budget up I can budget out the one retraining for ten people in the local community center or what have you quite easily but I can't budget out a training for a range of people that doesn't define the number of days the more specific the easier it is to budget out the second thing is for the reader of the proposal the potential donor they can imagine what it is you're trying to do in this activity they have a pretty good understanding what it is you're going to do in real life in the activity we showed you before it will be very difficult for that donor to imagine it and you do want to make sure that they can imagine what it is you're trying to do so Ark we see tip number three keep it short and simple a very important tip and here it says keep it simple stupid well I don't want to use that awful work so we'll but it's called kiss and you might have seen this before and there's a couple of issues a is trying a new simple language sometimes people tend to write proposals and they want to use very difficult language or very technical terms and for most proposal readers the donors that's not really necessary a proposal is meant to explain what it is you're trying to do you don't have to use very complicated language to do that and you should avoid it if you can and then the acronym soup you see a soup with all these acronyms or letters in it and try and limit your acronyms I've seen for both of with hundreds of acronyms in them and it gets very tedious for a reader also keep it short and and with few annexes who wants that let's imagine you're at the Bill Gates Foundation or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation then you get three thousand proposals and they're all sixty pages long who would want to read that if you can keep it short then you will do the reader a favor and very important followed by on a direction and here we have an example of the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation where they tell you please click here for the route the rules and the guidelines and exactly what you're supposed to be submitting read it very carefully because if a donor gets a lot of applications then if your application doesn't follow the rules specifically they'll chuck it out even if it's the best proposal of the bunch and it's happened to me early in my career once or twice and I don't make that mistake again and so shouldn't you it goes into the trash tab if you don't follow the regulations so tip number four build a good budget also very important the budget sometimes is an afterthought or people prepare proposals they will look at how much money is available maybe the grant is up to a hundred thousand and they'll just create a hundred thousand dollar budget that's not correct you want to make sure you budget out your activities very carefully so that it reflects what it is you want to do follow down the requirements like I just mentioned and be cost effective so but don't be cheap that's not the purpose the purpose is to to make sure the money is well spent to have the maximum impact but not for you to develop a chi program that's an issue I often see with with NGOs they think they have to do it as cheap as possible because the donors will like that now the donors have money to spend to solve a problem some of these problems cannot be solved on the cheap it has to be done with quality programming and quality programming requires proper funding if you need a computer to do your program include that computer in your budget if you need staff training capacity building security safety issues covered included in your in your budget don't be cheap but be cost effective be you can be frugal at the same time now use the proper currencies such as US dollars or your local currency and make sure that the donor understands because not everybody might know the currency in which you work and also with exchange rate fluctuations it's good to put the US dollar or URL or pounds whatever the case may be next to the local currency use and then also mention other funding if you have 30 percent of your proposal is already funded by other dorrance or by yourself through in-kind contributions or other means then mention that that means there's already some money available to start the program so that's about budgeting so our last tip tip number 5 let others read it extremely important and so easy to do and very often what happens to me is that I find the proposal that I've prepared maybe a year ago and using it and redeveloping it and I still find mistakes and I can tell you if your proposal if somebody else reads it and reviews it they will pick up mistakes they will look at find some syntax mistakes and they will also might they might also have some questions or need some clarifications and it can be a colleague it can be your spouse it can be a friend it can be anybody but anybody reading the proposal should be able to understand what it is about and having somebody else read it will make you pick up on a lot of things you can improve on the proposal and it's very easy to do so that's my last tip for you today so thank you everyone for viewing this presentation if you'd like to find out more information on the organizers please visit www.subscriptorium.com there and that's the black writing proposals