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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A few days after my blog post on the impact of climate change on coffee harvests in Guatemala, Elizabeth Rosenthal of the NYT published an article about the impact of climate change on coffee in Colombia. Here’s an excerpt:

TIMBÍO, Colombia — Like most of the small landowners in Colombia’s lush mountainous Cauca region, Luis Garzón, 80, and his family have thrived for decades by supplying shade-grown, rainforest-friendly Arabica coffee for top foreign brands.

In the last few years, coffee yields have plummeted here and in many of Latin America’s other premier coffee regions as a result of rising temperatures and more intense and unpredictable rains, phenomena that many scientists link partly to global warming.

Climate Change and the Drop in Coffee Harvests
	Coffee plants require the right mix of temperature, rainfall and spells of dryness for beans to ripen properly and maintain their taste. Coffee pests thrive in the warmer, wetter weather. Bean production at the Garzóns’ farm is down 70 percent from five years ago, leaving the family little money.

“Coffee production is under threat from global warming, and the outlook for Arabica in particular is not good,” said Peter Baker, a coffee specialist, noting that climate changes, including heavy rains and droughts, have harmed crops across many parts of Central and South America.

A top coffee scientist, he has rattled trade forums by warning of the possibility of “peak coffee,” meaning that, like oil supplies, coffee supplies might be headed for an inexorable decline.

A 2009 report from the International Coffee Organization that concluded, “Climatic variability is the main factor responsible for changes in coffee yields all over the world.”

Average temperatures in Colombia’s coffee regions have risen nearly one degree in 30 years, and in some mountain areas the increase has been double that. Rain in this area was more than 25 percent above average in the last few years.

At the new, higher temperatures, the plants’ buds abort or their fruit ripens too quickly for optimum quality. Heat also brings pests like coffee rust, a devastating fungus that could not survive the previously cool mountain weather. The heavy rains damage the fragile Arabica blossoms, and the two-week dry spells that prompt the plant to flower and produce beans occur less often, farmers say.

“Half a degree can make a big difference for coffee — it is adapted to a very specific zone,” said Néstor Riaño, a specialist in agroclimatology. “If temperature rises even a bit, the growth is affected, and the plagues and diseases rise.”

The Coffee Growers Federation has advised farmers to switch to a newer, hardier strain of Arabica that has been developed by plant breeders at Cenicafé over the last two decades.

For decades, said Luis Garzón, it was dry from June 1 to Sept. 8 in Timbío. Several years ago, the perplexing weather arrived. “It can start raining at 6 a.m. and go on for 24 hours,” he said.

First, yields declined. Then last year, the coffee rust fungus arrived at the Garzón farm, killing entire fields. “We learned our lesson,” he said, stroking the mottled yellowed leaves of some damaged plants. Now, the family is planting the new, hardier Arabica variant, called castillo.

Read the full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/science/earth/10coffee.html

How do you feel about climate change and agriculture: myth or reality?

What’s happening in the region where you live?
Please send your stories either here to our blog, our Facebook page, or to our Development Community.

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Planning for Impact
Why plan for impact? Because development isn’t keeping pace with growing need. Part of that is because the projects that we design and implement haven’t traditionally been designed to achieve long term impact.

Why our focus on impact?
	Escalating energy and food prices, shifting weather patterns, and increasing population pressures have led donors and INGOs to realize that we must use research to identify what has impact in development—and act with urgency. We need to shift from activity and output-based development to outcome and impact-based development.

• “It is time to take stock, admit that business-as-usual hasn’t worked, agree to change mind-sets, and really change the way that everyone works.” Vanessa Rubin, CARE International.
• “What is important today is to realize that the time for talking is long past. Now is the time for action.” Jacques Diouf, Director General FAO. A recent FAO study estimates that 1.2 billion people go hungry every day.
• “The stakes for increasing the effectiveness of philanthropy are very high. If we’re going to solve complex problems like climate change or AIDS, we must become much more serious about getting resources where they can have the most impact.” Jacob Harold, Hewlett Foundation.

What is impact? What are outcomes?
World Bank definitions:

• Impact is the long-term, sustainable changes in the conditions of people and the state of the environment that structurally reduce poverty, improve human well-being and protect and conserve natural resources.
• Outcomes are behavior changes in partners – changes that contribute to the long-term sustainable improvement in people’s lives.

We write impact statements for our Partner Projects that represent the very long-term goal that we’re hoping to achieve, and outcome statements for each one of our sub-goals which represent mid-term achievements that let us know that we are progressing towards our long-term impact.

A very important point:

Projects can only influence communities in making positive behavioral changes. For example, we can introduce the concept of hand washing, but it is ultimately their decision to incorporate it into their daily lives. We can’t force them, only influence their decision. Since we can only hope to influence our community, the outcomes and impacts are happening on a new level of development that depends on sustained behavioral change.

And how do we insure sustainability? How do we insure our communities will incorporate these behavioral changes? Through community buy-in. Through the community’s sense of ownership of the project.

How do you feel about influencing communities to make behavioral changes?

What’s happening in the region where you live?
Please send your stories either here to our blog, our Facebook page, or to our Development Community.

Be sure to join CSDi’s Development Community. Join 400 colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

Learn how to develop a community centered, impact oriented project.

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