10 Tips For Organizing Your Organization
- Ideas are the first step in finding funding. Create an environment in which ideas are encouraged and rewarded.
- Consider a needs assessment-formal or informal-but be aware that asking questions raises expectations. Be sincerely ready for change.
- One of the most significant funding trends of the past 24 months is joint ventures. They raise the power of your proposal (and cut down on competition). They do add some wrinkles to administration, such as sharing program and fiscal responsibilities.
- Think about using volunteers. Many new programs mandate a volunteer element as a form of both cost saving and citizen empowerment (the citizen technique of the '90s). You can even use volunteers as grant writers: After all, they often have the time and single-mindedness to stick with a task, play telephone tag, and work on building outside support.
- Encourage your staff, and help them, prewrite a grant "boilerplate." Store it on your computers for easy access and editing. Organizational charts, staff and organizational bios, evaluation plans, a list of previous funding, an inventory of resources, etc., can be prepared well in advance.
- Establish a procedure for internal and external clearance of proposals for both quality control and for legal reasons.
- Be sure the RFP's and program announcements are promptly shared by all appropriate staff and that you are on the mailing list of prospective funding sources.
- Plan for periodic staff training on effective proposal preparation. You may discover that some of your best writers might be at the middle or bottom of the organizational chart.
- Have an adequate quantity of both time and supplies to complete your grant projects.
- Time your organization and organize your time. Even the greatest of ideas doesn't get funded if nobody hears about it. To meet the deadline, make sure you don't let colleagues (or managers) slow you down.
