Donors are busy and have a dozen proposals sitting on their desks waiting to be read. As enthusiastic as you may be about your project, handing a lengthy proposal to a donor may not be the best way to start off your first meeting: It will just look like more work to them.

Something that I have found that is a good alternative is to initiate the relationship by handing them a 1½ or 2 page clearly organized document: a fact sheet. They can scan it for 30 seconds or a minute, and quickly get a good understanding of your project. We can easily look up the proper outline for a fact sheet—but how do we make it compelling?

What is compelling?
	A compelling story paints a picture that makes the reader feel ‘I was there’. It can be a heart-wrenching story about an event in the day of a family suffering extreme poverty, or it can be a heart-warming story illustrating something wonderful that happened to a family as a result of your organization’s work.

The best compelling stories illustrate a single, human-centered image that supports the theme of your work: something readers can relate to with a sense of urgency and immediacy through joy or sorrow. It is the thing that pulls at a donor’s heart strings. It is why we are in development.

Examples of positive compelling story lines:

• An illiterate farmer who hadn’t let his son attend school is invited to an NGO-led teacher-training workshop on math. Afterwards, he confided that he didn’t know what math was, but now that he sees its daily usefulness, he will encourage his son to enroll in school.
• An illiterate family has their third grade daughter read them news and stories at night after dinner—opening a window to a new world and expanding future family opportunities through their literate nine-year-old daughter.
• Through small but consistent earnings from NGO assisted sales of her textiles, a poor woman was able to increase family income enough to allow her to daughter attend school. Now, 16 years later, the daughter is preparing for her legal bar exams.

Writing your fact sheet

The two hardest things about writing are getting started and being too self-critical early on. When you have a first draft down on paper, read back through it and fix the obvious spelling and grammar problems. Then put it down, take a one-day break, and revisit it when you can approach it with a fresh mind.

When you are happy with the outcome, have someone else read it. Something that is clear as day to an author may not be clear to another reader. Another person’s comments can be very valuable in helping us to get our message across.

If your donors have their hearts warmed and feel that you captured the essence of their mission in your project design, you will have a greater likelihood of developing a partnership.  A donor will also be impressed with your well organized, professional presentation and sense that you will be a good organization to partner with.

What are your tips and techniques for connecting with a donor?

Please send your ideas either here to our blog, our Facebook page, or to our Development Community.

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Possibly, right now you are beginning the design of a project or program, and developing a plan for funding it.

The eBook is a compilation of four powerful techniques that will get you started.

The twelve chapters 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 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.

The example in this section is for a very simple needs assessment conducted by a food bank in Southern California. They used a participatory assessment technique called the Ten Seed Technique.

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 uncovered during the needs assessment.

First, in this Section 2 example, we look for solution-oriented activities to each of the problems prioritized in Section 1. Our search will uncover articles, handbooks and manuals focused on your community’s challenges.

Section 3. Don’t you want your project to work? Evidence based solutions are the key. Suppose that you are a mother whose children are suffering, and an unknown organization came to you with a plan to help your children. Wouldn’t you want that plan to work?

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’re looking for evidence based best practices. We provide simple instructions for finding scientific studies online.

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 the first step in building a logical framework.

This will only take 30 minutes to do, but it will make your project more presentable to a donor—and also much easier to develop management documents like budgets and schedules.

In Summary
Facilitating a needs assessment with community members gets right to the underlying causes of the challenges they face—and develops a sense of ownership on their part.
 
Including solution oriented activities that have shown scientific evidence of having worked on projects similar to your project, will give you a greater likelihood of success and sustainability once the project is launched.
 
Using my fast log frame template will quickly get you speaking the language that donors speak—and will set you up for developing budgets, schedules, and monitoring and evaluation plans. These in turn increase your chances of receiving donations and successes in managing sustainable, impact oriented projects.

Please note: These four techniques are part of the process for developing a project design in a course I teach called OL 101: Designing and Funding International Development Projects. The first two assignments in 101 include detailed instructions for conducting a live needs assessment, an example of a completed assessment, and a project concept based upon the results. The third assignment leads you through the process of finding evidence based best practices. The fourth assignment provides simple steps to developing a logframe and presenting it to a donor.

Designing & Funding International Development Projects begins every month.

Sincerely,

Tim Magee