Four Powerful 1st Steps in Designing & Funding Non Profit Projects

What the Book Includes

Self Paced

An 8-week, self-paced training guide for designing a nonprofit project to solve challenges faced by local community members. By the end of the 4 weeks, you will have designed a project complete with evidence based activities. You will also have written a project logframe in preparation for a preliminary donor meeting.

Learn by Doing.

Advance your Career, Raise Funds and Solve Challenges. This guide is for nonprofit and donor staff—and job-seekers wanting to successfully solve community challenges. Participants work on projects as diverse as social services, community development, education and the environment. The guide will lead you through the initial development of similar, real projects, in real time, in your own community.

The eBook is a compilation of four powerful techniques that will get you started on designing a new program or project.

How?

A dual approach is used in this guide:
1. The guide will lead you through initial development of a real program or project, in real time.
2. For long-term sustainability you will learn to incorporate community identified need into the design of your project and research project activities that have shown evidence of having worked at solving challenges.

Who should read this guide?

1. This guide is perfect for nonprofit staff and job-seekers wanting to successfully solve community challenges and fund programs—and who want to develop practitioner-level skills. If you are a grant writer, nonprofit staff member, consultant, project manager—or an executive director—you will develop real skills mastery.

2. This guide is just as relevant to a person considering a career transition into the nonprofit world and wanting to develop employable skills.

The Book.

10 Steps, 8 weeks:

Develop an impact-oriented program or project with community input, scientific evidence and donor input.

The four sections and 10 steps in the book provide background information and step-by-step, hands-on instructions for using these techniques.

Each section allows you to download a series of editable project deign templates that you can use to really speed up your project development process.

Section 1.

How to Conduct a Community Needs Assessment. In this section we look at how facilitating a needs assessment with your community can lead to a better understanding of needs and their underlying causes.
Step 1. The Ten Seed Technique.
Step 2. Developing a problem tree based on the community needs assessment.

Section 2.

How to Design your Project Incorporating the Results of your Needs Assessment. In this section, we look for solution oriented activities for designing programs to solve the problems prioritized during the needs assessment. Our search will uncover scientific articles, handbooks and manuals focused on your community’s challenges.
Step 3. What’s your theory of a solution to the challenges in the problem tree.
Step 4. Inserting solution-oriented activities into your new project outline.

Section 3.

Don’t you want your project to work? Evidence based solutions are the key. This section is for determining through scientific research if your initial activity ideas have shown evidence of having worked to solve your community’s needs and challenges. We provide simple instructions for finding scientific studies online.
Step 5. Investigating if there is a scientific basis that our proposed theory and activities have worked on other projects.
Step 6. Perfecting your solution-oriented activities with scientific evidence.

Section 4.

Fast Logframe for Project Funding & Management. In this section we’re going to take your problem statement, project outline and goal statement developed in the first three sections, and place them in a simplified matrix this is called a logical framework. This will make your project presentable to a donor.
Step 7. How will you organize your ideas for presentation to a donor?
Step 8. Organizing your project description into a beginning log frame.
Step 9. Sharing your project with a donor.
Step 10. Incorporating donor comments into your project design and log frame.