Beginning at the Beginning: Organizing Your Grant-Seeking Effort

To begin at the beginning will take us back to grant seeking. Most problems that occur in funded grant projects are best solved before you get the grant, and even before you apply for the grant. This takes us back to what happens before the application or proposal process. If your first thought is that nothing happens before we begin creating the proposal or grant application project package, then we’ve come tot he cause of many funded grant project problems, as well as the cause of much wasted time and effort in fruitless pursuit of grants you never had a real chance of winning in the first place.

The simplest, most effective, cheapest, and easiest way to fix problems is to avoid them. The place to start avoiding grant project The place to start avoiding grats project problems is with the organization of your grant-seeking effort, which is our first topic. The guiding principles behind the organization of a grant-seeking effort are:

• Grant seeking is a team sport.
• Members of the grant-seeking team need certain skills.
• The grant-seeking team needs resources with which to work.
• The grant-seeking team needs training and support.
• Grant seeking is a project itself and as such must have goals, guiding principles, and action plants.
• The grant-seeking effort needs a management plan.

Source: Grant Winner’s Toolkit: Project Management and Evaluation. James Aaron Quick and Cheryl Carter New