​LESSON 9

DEVELOPING AND PRESENTING A WINNING PROGRAM

OPENING REMARKS

I was working with the director of a youth program who wanted a federal grant for educational support for young women. Because he didn’t have time to work on the proposal with me (he would be on vacation), we met briefly to discuss his plans. Then I constructed what seemed like a responsible program to meet his objectives for the young women as well as the objectives set out in the request for proposals. But I made some assumptions that we had not discussed directly. Never assume!

The RFP required intensive work with participants, but the grants would be small. I designed a small program addressed to the age group we had agreed on, showed how it would fit into an existing program, and specified that a small number of new staff would be hired to work with the small group of young women who were identified as most needing the help. It turned out that the director had assumed that the federal grant could be larger than the announcement specified, and envisioned it supporting a much larger number of existing staff, working with all of the young women in that ​program. Obviously, I hadn’t communicated the RFP guidelines clearly. When he finally had time to read the draft, it became clear that we had to start over or scrap the proposal entirely. Unfortunately, because of the limited time left to revise the plan, and the requirements in the RFP, we missed this opportunity.—ASF

LEADING QUESTIONS

Okay, I’ve Identified a Need and Set Out Some Goals and Objectives for a Program I Think Will Meet That Need. Now What?

It’s finally time for the meat, the heart, of the grant proposal. The program description, or program plan, should show that you have a thoughtful, workable solution to the problem that you described in the need statement. A clear and detailed description of the proposed program must be strongly supported in several ways. And, as we discussed in Lesson 5, and as the opening example demonstrates, these details must be worked out (and sometimes argued out) in an ongoing, close partnership between the proposal writer, who understands the scope and limitations of the request for proposals, and the program supervisor and project staff, who understand the population to be served, the needs to be met, and their own objectives for the funding.

The program description must match the funder’s priorities. The program description should explain what you intend to do and clearly address what you know about the funder’s priorities. As we’ve said before, whenever possible use language from the grantmaker’s guidelines to describe your own program to show readers that the proposal focuses on the grantmaker’s concerns as much as your own.

Note again that this is not—indeed, must not be—a matter of changing the way your program operates in order to meet the guidelines. When organizations change their programs to chase funding rather than because they see the need or because they have thought of a better way to do things, they can lose touch with what they’re ​working for. Rather, describe your program in a way that lets the reader see how it fits into the funder’s priorities.

The program description must address your problem. Next, your program description must show exactly and realistically how the program will solve the problem you have identified. You need to include enough details to demonstrate that the planned activities, the number and type of staff, the number and type of persons who are to receive services, and the time frames for accomplishing your objectives are realistic, and that the program you have designed has a good chance of succeeding in achieving those objectives and making a positive impact.

The program description must be consistent with other parts of the proposal (not to mention clear and well organized). Consistency across all components of the proposal is extremely important. If one of your objectives is to deliver 80 additional meals a day to homebound individuals, you must be able to show exactly how you plan to accomplish this. How will you route deliveries to accommodate your full roster of current and new recipients, and still deliver the meals while they’re hot? Will you use an existing van for one or more additional routes? Will you purchase an additional van, and if so, is that part of the current proposal, or do you have other funding sources for it? Will you hire additional staff to prepare and deliver the meals, or will you use existing staff and volunteers? How many of each, how do you arrive at that number, and how will you rearrange the time of existing staff to squeeze in any additional meals that they need to prepare and deliver? Who will supervise them? How will you train any new workers to serve your target population?

In later lessons we discuss additional elements of your proposal that must be consistent with the objectives and the program, including evaluation and budget. For the moment, remember that you also need to know how much the extra 80 meals a day will cost, how much of that expense you are asking for in this grant proposal, and where the rest of the money is coming from.

The program description must show how the proposed program will fit into the organization. You may not just be adding 80 ​additional meals but rather creating an entirely new program, which cannot be “added on,” no matter how needed, but instead must be fully integrated into the organization. If the Meals on Wheels program is new, you also must discuss issues such as who will manage it, where it fits in the overall organization structure, what other programs should be linked to it, and for what purposes.

Whether the funding agency requires it or not, system-wide changes may be an outgrowth of many grants, especially very large ones, and you need to describe what changes you might anticipate and how they would be managed under the proposed program. Grant-funded programs, services, and staff members cannot be suddenly slapped onto a nonprofit, school district, municipal agency, or university structure like a sloppy coat of paint. The programs must become an integral part of the organization, linked to all the other diverse activities being conducted. You will need to show in your grant proposal exactly how you plan to achieve this.

The program narrative should describe how you will handle obstacles, including unanticipated disasters. Some of these obstacles may be simply programmatic: What will you do if you can’t recruit enough participants, or if you have too many? What will you do if your program space is not accessible to individuals with limited mobility?

Other obstacles may become more relevant during crises, and this is where a disaster plan comes into play. This has become a much greater concern lately. For example, if the proposal is for a school or after-school program, how will you protect the children in a disaster or even a shooting, and how will you ensure that the children are reunited with their parents as quickly as possible? What will you do if the parents can’t get there for some reason? If you run a home care program, how will you ensure that your clients continue to receive life-preserving services during and after a hurricane or an earthquake? How will you work with other nonprofits or government agencies in your community to address residents’ needs? If you’re a hospital or a nursing home, do you need an emergency generator ​to keep life-support systems going? (If you have one, where is it located? We learned from recent catastrophic hurricanes that such a generator needs to be in a place where it cannot be damaged by flood water—and that you need to have plenty of fuel on hand to keep it going.) What will you do if you have to evacuate staff or clients? What will you do if transportation is not available? Many of these issues may never come to the fore, but now, even for proposals that are not requesting a large sum of money, you should be able to demonstrate that you’ve thought about them.

It Seems Like a Waste of Time to Do All This Planning When We Don’t Know If We’ll Even Get a Grant. Why Can’t I Figure Out My Plans Once I Win the Grant?

Writing a proposal that doesn’t include a detailed, specific plan of operation is like a builder trying to build a house without blueprints. Program plans are the blueprint of the program and the proposal. Without this blueprint, you won’t get funded; grantmakers must see exactly what you plan to do with the grant money before they fork it over. If they don’t like what they see, they’ll go elsewhere. The reason that proposals generally follow a path that begins with a compelling, documented problem to be solved, followed by measurable objectives, is to make sure that the activities—the plan of operation, the blueprint—are designed to increase the chances of achieving the objectives. Besides, if the program is important to your participants, you may very well use this proposal to seek grants from other sources.

How Do Objectives Fit into a Program Plan?

A person who wants to start literacy classes for immigrants probably recognizes a need or problem that confronts immigrants in her community. She sees a literacy program as a good solution to the problem. We hope that she also recognizes the need to spell out measurable objectives that can be achieved through the program. Maybe she wants 60 Spanish-speaking immigrants to learn to read newspapers and be able to fill out forms written in English. Maybe she wants ​the participants to be able to apply for and get jobs or prepare for the citizenship examination. Maybe she hopes they’ll learn how to read labels on the food they buy for their families at local supermarkets. The objectives frame the way that activities will be designed to achieve them.

Without linking activities directly to objectives, staff members and proposal writers can get carried away. Suddenly they may find themselves proposing to take participants in their programs to the theater as a way to learn English. If you don’t look carefully and repeatedly at the objectives as the activities are being planned and developed, the program elements are likely to be haphazard and random. They may be fun, like going to the theater, but what outcomes are they achieving, what impact are they having? (And if you think the theater outings really will achieve your objectives, why would a funder give you money for the theater without knowing why you are going?)

How Can I Know Whether Certain Activities Will Achieve Objectives?

This should be the easy part. As we indicated in Lesson 5, you, the organization’s only proposal writer, may have absolutely no background in literacy programs, no knowledge of immigrant cultures. Or you, the program person and writer, may have a lot of knowledge about literacy or about immigrants and their cultures; this may be your area of expertise. But no matter what the programmatic expertise of the person writing the proposal, individuals with experience, background information, and commitment to the community certainly must be deeply involved in the development of the program and the fleshing out of activities. They’re the ones who know what activities are likely to work to meet the objectives—and they’re the ones who will have to run the program and who will be responsible for the results.

What’s in a Program Plan?

Don’t scrimp on the program development phase of the proposal process. Use kickoff and planning meetings (described in Lesson 5) to flesh ​out the program elements and address potential obstacles to achieving your objectives. The program plan must address everything that will occur from the time a grant award is announced to the time the money is received, and to the end of the funding period (and beyond).

Timeline and staff responsibilities. Construct a timeline, whether the application requires one or not. The timeline should include absolutely every activity that you must undertake to establish, implement, and evaluate the program. What will you do in Month 1? Who will do it? Can you do more than one thing in the first month, or will you be spreading yourself too thin? Here is a sample timeline for the literacy program for Spanish-speaking immigrants (by the way, notice our use of the active voice, as discussed in Lesson 6):

The timeline need not be described in a list like the one above; it may be in paragraph form, with one or two sentences for each activity. Or all of these activities may be summarized simply in a chart like the following, either in the text, if there is space, or in an attachment. But don’t omit the narrative description of when things will occur and who will do them.

Sample Timeline for Literacy Program

Job descriptions. You may or may not need to submit job descriptions with every proposal, but your plan should include detailed descriptions for each type of staff member who will be hired through ​the grant. In the example above, who are the necessary staff members and what are the necessary experience, qualifications, and responsibilities of each? If there will be workers other than the project director and teachers of English for speakers of other languages (say, a clerical worker to maintain student records), what are the necessary experience, qualifications, and responsibilities?

Staff recruitment plan. This plan should define how and where job postings will be distributed. (Nationwide or local? Internet sites or newspapers? Which outlets? College placement offices, newspaper advertisements, flyers distributed throughout the community? Are trade union contract issues involved in hiring?) It should include everything you will need to do to get started once you know the grant funds will be available. Some grants require a lengthy contract process, so if you don’t start addressing recruitment until the money becomes available, you’ll be so delayed in implementing the program that you may have a difficult time conducting all the activities you mention in your proposal and spending the money on schedule. This is especially true for local governments, where the hiring process can take considerable time (see the discussion below on government recruitment and hiring).

Advisory board recruitment. If you need an advisory board but don’t have established relationships with people you think should be members, now—before you start to implement the program—is the time to call or write emails or letters, describe the project to them, and invite them to join the advisory board if the grant receives funding. If the project is a collaborative one, the advisory board may simply be members of the various organizations you’re working with who have assisted in the development of the program. But the role should be formalized.

Government agency recruitment and hiring. If you are writing a proposal on behalf of a city, school district, county, or state government agency, you may need to start the procurement and hiring process as early as the time the proposal has been submitted, even before you know you’ve won a grant—maybe even before you finish ​the proposal. Many cities have rigorous and complex procedures for subcontracting with not-for-profit organizations and for hiring staff; these procedures may be completely different from procedures for not-for-profits, which are relatively simple. The best way to plan ahead is to decide while you are developing your grant proposal what staff members you need and which agency personnel lines are appropriate. Check with your budget or contracting office to see how you can hire staff most expeditiously and receive contracted services so that grant funds can be spent quickly. Do this now, before you even apply for a grant. We mean it. You don’t want to get all tangled up in bureaucratic red tape as you’re trying to get your exciting grant-funded program off the ground.

Participant recruitment. Don’t take participant recruitment for granted. Some grant recipients are surprised to find that offering a great new program to a target population with a clearly demonstrated need doesn’t always bring the participants flocking to the door when the program opens. You need to explain in your program plan what methods you will use to recruit participants, how you will ensure that the program will grab and hold their interest, and how you will keep them coming back. Will you conduct extensive outreach in the media? Will you ask professionals in your field (physicians, schoolteachers or counselors, social workers, youth workers, senior center staff) to make referrals to your program? Is a proposed activity so popular in your community that it will keep every participant engaged for the entire time? If you’re not sure whether it’s that popular (even if sorely needed), will you pay stipends? Provide child care? Give a gift certificate or a pizza party or a job to everyone who completes the program successfully?

Marketing plan. While working on your proposal, think about how you will sell your program to the community—not just to those who will directly participate and benefit. Will you invite reporters from community newspapers and local radio and television stations to visit? Will you send out short press releases describing the program ​or announcing an existing program’s expansion? Funders often ask about community buy-in or stakeholder buy-in. Although they sound like clichés or buzzwords, these terms spell out exactly what you want to achieve. You want the community to take ownership of your program—to brag about it—to feel secure knowing it’s up and running. We’ve mentioned buy-in often; it’s important.

How Do I Make Sure That the Plan of Operation Covers Everything?

If you view your grant proposal as a marketing tool—to sell the seriousness of your problem and the wisdom of your solution—then the activities are the key to your sales pitch. For each of your objectives, you should have one or more activities that are clearly designed to accomplish that objective. Let’s say one of your objectives for that “delightful” weekend reading program discussed in the previous lesson is to improve attitudes toward reading as a result of the program. What, exactly, will happen during the program that will improve attitudes toward reading? Maybe some famous people can visit and discuss their own attitudes toward reading. Maybe a well-known local author would agree to discuss her reading history. You might take the children to visit the library, or to a place where books are bound. Popular athletes may promote reading. None of these activities are necessarily likely to improve reading scores, but they very well may improve attitudes toward reading, which may be a good first step toward improving the scores.

No matter how many objectives you propose to achieve, specific activities must be described for each one. Be as detailed as possible. Instead of saying “athletes will read to children,” say “football players from John F. Kennedy High School have agreed to read to the children; the football players will receive community service credit for their participation.” If possible—and that depends on space and other limitations—a letter from the high school principal should be included in the proposal package, describing the football players’ involvement in the program. The more details, and the more partners who have ​signed on (like the principal and football players of John F. Kennedy High School), the more likely the program is to receive funding.

POP QUIZ

True or False?