Non-profit Project Proposal and Fundraising

• The lecture is titled "Developing Non-profit Project Proposal, Fundraising and Managing Donor Grants: Professional Action Research"
• Lecture numbers are 3 & 4 for course IRL6050 in Spring, 2025 under Dr. N. Minde

Grant-Competitive Proposal Imperatives

• It is important to develop a grant-competitive proposal
• Essential elements needed increase the chances of success

Key Steps for a Grant-Competitive Proposal

• Research potential grants
• Carefully adhere to the funder's guidelines
• Expand professional networks for team-based bids
• Initiate joint bids and involve collaborators
• Commit to thorough literature reviews that include research and data
• Develop the capacity to work across different boundaries
• Submit applications, starting the process early
• Build resilience to overcome disappointing results
• Use feedback to improve future submissions upon failure
• Revise rejected bids to take advantage of new opportunities

Strengthening Grant Proposals

• Dedicate time to reading, writing, and publishing to enhance the CV
• Use proactive partnerships if your CV is lacking
• Leverage the synergy between research and publication when grants are awarded
• Ensure high proposal quality and originality
• Create an innovative and attention-grabbing project title

Managing Donor Grants Effectively

• A hypothetical $100,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation exists for a widow inheritance intervention and HIV/AIDS research in Nyanza Province
• The grant spans two years, covering three communities
• Key considerations exist for effective management of a project grant over its duration
• This grant is assumed to be a joint professional grant divided between 4 researchers, and not an institutional grant.

Grant Management - Key factors for successful grants

• Budgets are activity-focused and detailed
• Time plan creates expenditure milestones
• All expenditure is budget-informed and receipted
• Reports and receipts kept up-to-date
• Narrative reports support and substantiate project implementation
• Project cash receipts generated to account for stipends and incidentals
• Mid-term reports used for budget and timeline revisions when required

Efficient Grant Management

• Determine who manages the grant, and if this is specific to the project with management implications
• Expenditure and accounting adhere to the approved grant budget.
• Account stays ready for impromptu audits
• Integrity & discipline act as important personality factors
• Transparent management can unlock future grant opportunities

Action Research (AR) - Kurt Lewin (1933)

• Kurt Lewin, a German social psychologist who emigrated to the US in 1933, defined Action Research (AR)
• It is a social research carried out by teams that includes action researchers and members of an organization or a community
• Objective is to study/understand real problems that affect real people with a view to solving them in partnership with the people concerned
• Problem-solving and transformative research where stakeholder participation is promoted in the research which leads to problem-solving intervention
• The emphasis on stakeholder or end-user participation has resulted in the alternative name of “participatory action research”

Empirical Research Component

• Absence of agreement among scholars on how the empirical research element of AR should be conducted
• Should research be positivistic or post-positivistic in conceptual and methodological approach?

Guidelines for Empirical Research

• Grounded understanding & conceptualization of the research problem
• How have similar problems been previously addressed?
• Implement fieldwork-based research that allows participation of the people being studied
• Longitudinal understanding of the experiential structure of the people from their subjective perspectives regarding the problem under investigation (phenomenology)
• How is meaning and reality established by the people?
• What meaning do they ascribe to their conditions & experiences? - intersection of ethnomethodology & phenomenology
• Understand that the researchers involvement affects how research influences the research process and the research outcome to proactively improve the outcomes (Reflexivity)
• Critical review of reality for a change (data analysis)
• Connection between theory & practice, where theory informs practice, while practice improves theory (dialectical)
• Ethical concerns within the research and ways of handling them

Problem-Solving Component

• Action Research (AR) aims to solve problems and create beneficial outcomes
• AR contributes to social change by engaging groups to challenge power dynamics
• AR engages social groups to instigate positive social change deemed essential in the setting
• AR focuses on empowering the underprivileged

Aspects of Focus in AR

• How to empower the disempowered, privilege the under privileged
• How to challenge and restructure the social structures that beget and perpetuate power imbalances, relationships of exclusion, repression, exploitation and disempowerment
• Resolving conflict, peace building, and strengthening social and human institutions

Action Research Proposal - Key Elements

• Abstract or executive summary is helpful to set the scene
• Problem Statement will identify the issues and questions of interest
• Objectives highlight what the project has set out to achieve
• Project Rationale and Significance makes the case for the projects value and place in the field
• Literature Review gives appropriate background and context for the proposed work
• Hypotheses will guide the basis of the work and testing
• Methodology gives outline of design, tests, experiments and data collection methods for the project
• The project should identify a tentative post-research intervention plan
• Project should highlight its Expected Outputs
• Identify Potential Ethical Issues
• Project Evaluation Criteria and design is useful to understand
• Implement Action time plan
• Create realistic and justified budget

Project Abstract/Executive Summary

• Project abstract is a brief summary of a proposed or completed study
• Flexible to sell the work
• Should include:
• Central argument/ objectives
• Driving rationale/motivation
• Links to gaps in knowledge and problem solving intervention
• Methods, data, and case study descriptions
• Highlight project intervention plan and activities
• Mention present/future/past tense of the work

Problem Statement/Project Background

• Project background gives context in the narrative
• Best practice is to put research questions in narrative form
• Identify why these issues have arisen
• Make sure research problems are clear
• Consider size of proposal being made
• Take into consideration the practical dimensions

Project Objectives

• Research objectives should relate to the problems being tackled
• Research objectives must come from the actual problems
• Objectives help in breaking down research questions, but must be directly contradict the problems being highlighted
• Research Objectives are specific
• Best practice is to add numbering and state in declarative form
• Objectives must have a practical dimension

Literature Review and Hypothesis

• The literative review will help frame the project and the gaps
• Hyopthesis formulation should follow the scientific process

Methodology

• What designs and experiments are well suited to the study?
• First phase needs to be methodology for the research, including designs
• 2nd phase the framework to the problem solving
• This needs to be guided by the project activities

Tentative post-research intervention plan

• Some aspects subsume under methodology
• It has to have clear indicative intervention actions
• Timelined, described, outlined etc

Risks and Ethical Considerations

• The project has to focus on nature with regard to sensitivity, traditions and norms
• Highlight potential risks, and how you're going to protect vulnerable people
• Ethical considerations must be framed narratively

Expected Output and Outcomes

• These are potential outcomes
• Qualitative and Quantatative
• Explicit,itemized and and highlighted is not obvious
• Should be wide ranging with impact within project

Project Evaluation

• Discuss project evaluation.
• Come up with the considerations
• Develop a plan to manage the consideration
• Highlight those details

Budget and Financial Accountability

• Project manager should keep a record
• This includes record for budgeting and financial items too
• Account for all activity based data
• Has to be detailed
• Justified with the budget

Following Good Budget Management

• Follow frameworks
• Use contingency voting
• Be reasonable
• Be careful not to fall radically below maximum limits

Budget Financial

• Legal contracts
• Abide to financial policies from all parties
• Maintain compliance with the project and funders policies
• Accounts must be done at stipulated intervals
• Income/expenditure statement should be at front of project

Accounts

• Be structured systematically to the approved grant budget
• Prepare financial statement with activity clusters
• Be explicit on the funding that comes and goes
• Be sure to highlight any service charges, and their impact
• Have proper income/expenditure accounts

Receipts

• Have systematics when organizing, and always keep duplicate
• Special workshops are useful when organizing large funding sources
• Project manager has to manage any guidelines given

Induction

• Involve people to be trained on financial and funds
• invoices or receipts can come into play
• Be aware these can be interchangeable
• For large project be aware to hire financial managers, to highlight implications
• Reinforce reports through communications

Additional Issues - What a well run project needs

• A project should be appropriate in complexity, size and duration
• It has to follow requirements
• Oversight of projects can be complex
• Projects should employ a manager, and even be a management office if needed
• Even those those managers are there, the manager will need to overlook all aspects

Other details to improve your action research

• Employ the additional items for future steps in the work
• Maintain documentation through the operation
• Use the staff, through technical competence and ability
• Selection of people that work with end users
• division of labour is implemented correctly
• Meetings that follow etiquette in the management team
• There are oversight in the domain
• There transparency must prevail

Improving Transparency in Project Reporting

• Best practices and lessons that come form implementation
• Handle challenges appropriate, be aware of common problems
• Avoid distortions in financial details

Improving Project Appeal

• Photography and video are key to highlight the impact
• invite funders to attend
• Encourage visitors to your site

Direct Problem-solving Intervention Projects

• Should ask : what are major differences between a direct problem solving intervention project and action research project
• Direct solving is different that action research
• Empirical data and finding solutions are both interconnected
• Action research and direct solving should be able to improve
• Some solving has to be implemented by third party

Final factors

• Pre feasibility might be useful
• Proposal is strongly backstopped with supporting data
• Africa has various examples of projects that seek out to direct solving and intervene
• Dissemination of results is important to the development and conflict resolution
• itemize findings when the project is finished

Explore crafting competitive grant proposals, fundraising, and managing donor grants. Learn key steps, including researching potential grants, adhering to guidelines, expanding professional networks, and building resilience. Also, learn how to revise rejected bids for future opportunities.