Before asking for programmatic financial support—writing a proposal—you should have a well-developed description of the program—a Goals Grid. I say this for three reasons: 1) It gets all of the stakeholders in alignment and agreement; 2) It allows for easier reporting for successes/challenges; and 3) It increases the program’s chances to succeed.

Surprisingly, in my experience, most programs are not well defined with any sort of Goals Grid within many organizations, small, medium, or large. It’s usually one or two people who have the program description in their head or written in a narrative form with few if any real quantitative measures. I don’t know why this is…perhaps it’s because it is not something that’s taught very frequently outside of business or project management courses…or people do not to want to be measured…? The challenge is donors prefer to fund programs that are not purely qualitative—they want some quantitative measures. So, here is a quick and dirty sketch of six descriptors I use in my Goals Grid to develop the narrative for a Case for Support:

  1. Goals—1 to 3 goal (s): What is the program trying to achieve?
  2. Rationale—1 to 3 per goal: Why the program is important.
  3. Objective—1 to 3 per Rationale: Specific and measurable targets of what you want to achieve.
  4. Strategies, Short-Term–1 to 3 Objective: What has to be done. Define your team, roles, logistics, activities, materials, etc., from 0 to 1 year.
  5. Strategies, long-term: What has to be done. Define your team, roles, logistics, activities, materials, etc., from 1 to 3 year.
  6. Measurements: Indicators to gauge your success.

Moreover, I often use a timeline with milestone and benchmarks to encourage programmatic success and increase ease to reporting those highlights for continued funding. Without a Goals Grid, more often than not, nonprofits are lost programmatically, especially as it relates to fundraising.

What sort of Goals Grid do you use? What do you use to pull together a narrative for a proposal?