What are your organization’s funding priorities for the new year?
If your non-profit organization is only just beginning to incorporate grant writing into its strategic plan, focus on identifying just one or two funding priorities that will help further your mission and vision in the new year.
Once you know what needs to be funded, a logic model is an excellent tool for creating a clear and measurable outline of how a funder’s contribution will help you meet those goals. There are many ways to create a logic model but a typical format contains five components:
Statement of Need - This is a clear and concise description of why the funding you are requesting is necessary. It is a good place to add local and/or national data points about the problem you are trying to solve or the need faced by the population you are serving.
Inputs - This is where you will outline what is needed for your proposed project to take place including, the staff, volunteers, time, technology, materials and money. Be specific!
Activities - An activity is the project that will take place once you have secured all of the aforementioned inputs. For example, your organization may be seeking funding to run a weekly support group for spousal caregivers in the community.
Outputs - Any of the direct results of the activity you are proposing will be described here. For the weekly support group, an output may be that all spousal caregivers who register for the group will then attend every week for the duration of that activity. Don’t forget to put your evaluation plan here - will you take attendance each week to measure actual group participation against your goal?
Outcomes - These are the longer-term results of the activity. To extend the example above, you could describe how caregivers that participate in the support group will then be surveyed one year later about their self-reported health and well-being which can then be compared to how they rated it before participating in the program. How would you know this? Again, have an evaluation plan! In this case you could issue a pre- and post-program survey to participants.
A final step in the logic model process is to create a sustainability plan. This will explain to the funder how the activity you are proposing will continue after the grant funding ends. Need help getting started? Get in touch with us today!