Another question on grant application forms that is often answered badly, is the question on monitoring and evaluation.  You need to show that you understand the need to check and capture that what you are doing is actually delivering your original aims.  You may need to have some data about existing numbers / confidence / abilities, so you can show in a year’s time that these numbers have increased (or decreased, depending on what you’re aiming for!).   

First of all let’s clarify the difference between firstly monitoring, and secondly evaluation.  Monitoring is collecting your initial (benchmark) data, and then the data after your project has been running for a measurable period.  You will often need to supply some raw monitoring data to your funder.  Evaluation is the process of thinking about the data, considering its implications, and using it to amend aspects of your project. 

So to begin with it can be useful to track down some demographic information about your service provision area.  See Step 4  http://tamaraessex.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/ten-steps-to-the-perfect-funding-bid-step-4/#more-48 for details of finding the statistics relevant to your project.  

For example, you may establish that 31% of the catchment population are aged 60 and over, and that 3.2% of the catchment area are from Black and other ethnic minorities.  Then if the visitor records (for example) show that only 5% of visitors are aged 60 and over, or only 0.5% are from Black and other ethnic minorities, this would in turn prompt some active outreach to those communities under-using the facilities, and some active consideration of what inadvertent blocks are being put in the way.   Collecting the data about who is taking up your service, and putting it in a report, is the monitoring part.  Considering the report and deciding whether any action is needed (such as changing the publicity to target additional people), is the evaluation part.

Those are the first, possibly easier questions to monitor.  The others should arise from the aims and outcomes you had set out in your project plan and grant application.  You may have a satisfaction survey from prior to your project, so you can show that satisfaction has increased – but be aware that satisfaction with your service, while good, is not an actual change.  You should be aiming to collect quantity and quality data, showing some kind of change within individuals, groups, communities etc.  And for coherence, those changes need to arise directly from your original outcomes.

So if your project was about reducing childhood obesity, through providing neighbourhood football coaching for primary school age children, the measurements would need to cover the general problem of childhood obesity in the area (data from the NHS), but also the specific weight of a good sample of the children taking part in the project.  Collecting the same data at the end of the project (or after 6 months or a year) gives you the monitoring data which you can then evaluate.  At this stage you may also be given useful feedback from teachers, that the children involved now have better concentration, or are working better together in class, and have perhaps exceeded their expected grades.  This is fantastic and should be reported – but don’t suddenly change tracks and report this as the main evaluation of the project!  Stay coherent – look at your original planned outcomes – and make sure your evaluation follows through and tells the same story.

For an example of a project that has really taken this a step further, take a look at www.provingit.org  where “A Child’s Right” sets out its evaluations, linking the donor dollar directly to the outcomes for the children.  It’s a very impressive demonstration of an organisation that understands the connection that charitable trusts and individual donors want to make between the funds and the outcomes.

©  Tamara Essex 2011

Even in tendering, the Local Authority putting out the tender will announce the weighting they have put on the costings versus the written proposal.  Normally in care services it’s about 60:40 in favour of quality (ie the written part of the submission).  In fact this tender in Devon was for care, but was on a 50:50 weighting.  So once you’ve done the budget and have come up with the correct PRICE for your service (ie cost plus surplus), there is probably little you can do to change that.  Whereas the WORDS you use can make a big difference.

Let me tell you about Top Tweeter Andrew Knowles.  He tweets as @andrew_writer and is well worth following for marketing tips, writing tips, and indeed tweeting tips!  My reason for mentioning Andrew is that he writes for a living.  He writes press releases, leaflets, letters, tweets, Facebook updates for businesses, perhaps even fundraising applications.  He’s also a BT Storyteller for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games.  And on average, Andrew re-drafts a 140-character tweet four or five times.  Because he’s a pro.  So why might we dash off a quick funding bid on the afternoon of the deadline, press “Send”, and then wonder why it didn’t get the money?  Andrew, his professionalism, his concentration on detail and on crafting every word to be the most effective, could be what we’re up against.  Follow him on Twitter for a regular reminder that we can’t be slapdash in writing funding bids.

I also want to tell you about another writer, a Bournemouth-based fundraising copywriter called Nicole Schmidt.  Like Andrew and all good bloggers / networkers, Nicole gives away her tips – take a look at www.copyphilanthropy.com to read her take on why words matter.  Nicole spoke this week to the Dorset Fundraisers’ Network, and probably her biggest tip was “Show, don’t tell.”  Don’t TELL a funder what your organisation does / will do with the grant – SHOW them.  Introduce them to a person, show them inside that person’s life, show them the impact of your organisation’s work.  She also highlighted the difference between an organisation-centred line – “We’re protecting endangered species …..” and a donor-centred line – “By adopting an animal YOU can help protect endangered species …..”

If you were going to learn a foreign language, or learn to drive, you’d know you had to go and get some help, maybe take a course of lessons.  But because we can all write , we all think we can write!  We’ve all been writing since an early age, as in forming words and sentences – but we can still learn from the professionals.  I particularly wanted to introduce you to these two consummate professionals this time, and I hope you’ll explore Nicole’s and Andrew’s work to pick up some ideas.

©  Tamara Essex 2011

Almost 10% of the marks are for innovation.  Yet there is no question on the application form for applicants to outline how they feel the project is innovative.  A few points for delivery competence, not many, but it would be worth a few lines explaining our track record – even though this is not requested on the application form, nor hinted at in the guidance notes.

This kind of thing is sadly common.  I blogged last year about how the Lottery Board members see a “Top Secret” list of the most common reasons for the failure of Lottery applications.  A useful list – but they don’t want applicants to see it!  The full list is given out on my training course “Ten Steps to the Perfect Funding Bid”, and the top three are in the blog entitled Lottery:  Reasons They Reject Bids.

In actual fact NOT telling applicants, is a sensible tactic from the perspective of the Lottery Officers.   They have too many applications.   They need to be able to reject the majority even before they have finished reading them.  Having a few “secret” items on their checklists enables them to fail you by page two and chuck your hard work in the bin.  If all applicants were working off the same full guidance, and the quality of all applications was higher, their job would be much harder.  Understandable, then, but inexcusable in my book.

In sharp contrast to this secrecy is the tendering process underway in Devon for a number of large social care contracts.  The strict laws applying to tendering require total transparency.  In one recent tender for carers’ services Devon County Council set out clearly that there were 420 points for service quality, and 280 points for pricing.  The breakdown within the quality section will vary dependent on the service, but the headers are likely to remain the same –

• Organisational experience and principles – 75 points
  Involving carers / users – 40 points
  Service delivery and evaluation – 120 points
  Added Value – 40 points
  Workforce – 75 points
  Equality – 70 points

Bearing in mind the strict wordcount, it is therefore logical to use more of the available words for the questions that are worth more points.  Your carefully crafted answer could score zero if it’s the last answer in a section and it’s discounted because you are over the word count.   But at least this is clear from the guidance notes.

This clarity enables everyone’s application to be considered fairly against transparent criteria.  Some charitable trusts and foundations issue equally clear guidance notes.  Some, however, ask one set of questions but then use an entirely different checklist for scoring.  The best we can all do is to read the guidance notes several times, and try to read between the lines.

©  Tamara Essex 2011

Read his post at     http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/howard-lake/charities-dont-mention-th_b_910769.html   and avoid injunctions, damages, and criminal proceedings.

I’m in the middle of developing a new training course on “Advanced Bid-Writing Skills” and some thoughts from that will appear in this blog shortly.

As the last blog outlined, even if funders don’t ask you to break down your budget to show a unit cost, most appraisers will do a rough calculation on a bit of scrap paper.  So if your total project costs (direct and indirect, including some core costs) come in at £30,000, and you are delivering a service (whatever it is) to 600 people over a year or over the summer, then the unit cost is £50 per person receiving the service, perhaps for a day of therapeutic treatments, or a day out on a care farm.  If you deliver that service to 2,000 people then the unit cost is £7.50, perhaps for a volunteer visit or a shopping service.

There can an unfortunate habit within the voluntary and community sector to assume that the cost is the cost and it cannot be reduced.  In fact it is ALWAYS possible to reduce costs, and there are two ways to do it.  You either reduce the expenditure but deliver the same quantity of service, or you deliver a higher quantity of service while keeping the core and indirect costs the same.  I will explain these two methods below.  I will accept that in many cases it is better to decide NOT to reduce costs (usually for quality control purposes) but I would argue that the process needs to be considered, and then rejected on clear policy grounds, rather than simply rejected without consideration.

1)      Reducing expenditure.  Look at whether a full-time co-ordination post could become part-time on this particular project, or whether rent could be reduced by sharing with another charity.  If you are budgeting to buy or hire your own minibus, see if you could use someone else’s during their downtime (eg school transport can be cheaply available between 9.30 and 2pm).  People
are often surprised to discover it can sometimes be cheaper to use freelancers than employees, and this further reduces payroll and HR costs.  Controversially, you also need to look at whether you can reduce the actual project costs – look around for cheaper
suppliers for catering etc, though it is important to balance quality against costs to avoid reducing to below the standards you wish to maintain.

2)      Increasing outputs.  For example if the project co-ordinator is managing six part-time care workers supporting 18 service-users with disabilities, consider increasing the number of service-users the team supports.  This would probably involve more hours from the front-line team, but should be easily manageable within the co-ordinator’s workload.  So although the total project cost  increases, the unit cost will decrease because the core and indirect costs have not increased.

Here’s an example
Project co-ordinator costs £24,000, and 6 p-t care staff do 10 hours per week each at £10ph which is £30,000 per annum (I always work on 50 weeks a year – it makes the maths easier!).  Total cost £54,000 for 3,000 care hours, so the unit cost is £18.  Now unless this is highly specialised care, if a budget came out at this cost it is far too high, compared to the rest of the home care market.

a)       So under the first system of reducing expenditure, you could reduce the project co-ordinator to half-time, ie £12,000.  This immediately reduces the project cost to £42k and the unit cost per hour to £14.

b)      Under the second option of increasing outputs, you could increase the number of service-users and the hours of your
care workers, to deliver 15 hours per week rather than 10.  This puts your frontline costs up to £45k, so the total project cost is £69k, but your hours have increased to 4,500 so the unit cost reduced to £15.33.

c)      If you were able to implement BOTH strategies, as long as you felt the co-ordinator could successfully supervise the increased workload on the new part-time hours, your costs would be £12k for the co-ordinator and £45k for care staff.   £57k total cost divided by 4,500 hours is £12.66.

This is highly simplistic, and I know you’re all shouting about rent, telephone, insurance, travel, recruitment etc, but this is just an example of the impact that reducing input costs or increasing outputs has on the unit cost.  It shows a way of taking a third off the
starting position of £18ph.

“Not representing sufficient value for money” was the third most common reason for Lottery bids being rejected last year.    http://tamaraessex.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/lottery-reasons-they-reject-bids/   This has powerful implications for your
budgetting, whether you are applying to a charitable trust or foundation for a grant, or whether you are tendering for a major contract.

Full and accurate unit costing is as much a part of the project manager’s role as that of the finance section.  Getting it right, and
understanding how to adjust costs in the light of known competitors’ costs, is now an essential tool in the modern service manager’s arsenal.  So keep that calculator close at hand!

©  Tamara Essex 2011

Is it worth ranting about Communitybuilders?  They are, after all, one of the victims of the “bonfire of the quangos” and will disappear after March.  But in the meantime, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that their one remaining function is to get the remaining money out there as straightforwardly as possible, to as many successful applicants as possible?  Yes, it would.  The reality however is rather different.

I was working on a fundraising project for a new-build community centre.  We had hoped to apply for a Main Stage grant from Communitybuilders, for funds (part grant, part loan) towards the actual buiding.  Then in September 2010, once the quango-cuts had been announced, Communitybuilders were told that all their funds had to be allocated by March 2011 and spent by March 2012.  That would probably be OK, as our Feasibility Grant application had just been submitted, and if successful would be rapidly followed by the Main Stage grant application, hopefully to be allocated funds by March 2011.

But no, a further change of instructions from the government meant that in November 2010 we were told that all Main Stage funds now had to be SPENT by March 2011 – clearly impossible for our project.  Never mind, our Feasibility Grant application had been successful so we had some funds for a major external reality check – some expertise to revisit the Business Plan and the funding strategy in the light of the recession and the closure / changed priorities of some of the major capital funders.

Excellent.  Then the paperwork arrived.

First the Trustees were required to pass a Special Resolution accepting the funds, agreeing only to spend it on what it was for, and nominating two Trustees to be the named people who could sign the acceptance letter.  The short deadline for this resolution to be passed, signed, and returned to Communitybuilders meant a special Trustees’ meeting had to be convened.  The two nominated Trustees then had to complete the Money Laundering / Fraud Prevention forms.  This required them to provide proof of who they are (eg passport or driving licence), and proof of where they live (eg utility bill, council tax demand).  The ORIGINALS of these document must be sent to Communitybuilders.  HUH?  Who sends their passport or driving licence off to a funder?  Ah, there’s an alternative.  Photocopies will be accepted, but must be signed as a true copy by a solicitor.  HUH???  And all this by the end of February.  Along with the certificate of incorporation of the Company Ltd by Guarantee.

The Trustees are, of course, volunteers.  Most have other jobs.  Some may be sick, disabled, housebound etc.  These demands are really excessive.  Had the timings not changed, and had we made a successful Main Stage application for – say £500,000 – it would be a reasonable and proportionate requirement.  Our successful grant, for which all this was required, was for £12,000, and was anyway only going to be paid on completion of the revised business plan and funding strategy and submission of the actual invoices. 

Where is the sense of proportion here?  Even Awards for All simplified their process to remove the need to provide signatories certified by the bank at application stage (see blog Favourite funding sources – update: Awards for All simplifies! for details).  I’d lobby Communitybuilders to change their procedures, but it’s just not worth it.  Let’s see if the government’s new funds for social enterprise, the voluntary sector, and the Big Society are any more straightforward.  Are you holding your breath?

©  Tamara Essex 2011

I’ve been developing a new training course with my colleague Margaret MacKenzie of The Swan Company (www.theswancompany.co.uk – strapline “taking the cold out of calling!”).  She’s an expert in business-to-business relationship building, and we’ve come together to combine specialisms and to help charities and VCOs to find ways of extracting cash from businesses. 

So will a business, facing another difficult year, stump up funds to a local charity?  We would argue that it depends on how you approach them.  And this highlights a really bad habit that I think VCOs fall into.  We tend to focus on what WE need, and how brilliant OUR project is, and we think that this is enough to convince the whole world to be hugely impressed and instantly give us all the funds we need.  Well here’s the reality check – it ain’t that easy.  Businesses are not charities and they aren’t grant-making bodies.  They need a reason to give out their hard-earned cash, especially at the moment.

And what we will be helping VCOs to explore in our new training course, is how to show the businesses that there are good solid reasons, and that supporting a local charity can make good business sense.  We need to think not about what we need, but what we can offer.  This also has the advantage of making the relationship a more equal partnership, rather than one of supplicant and benefactor.

So we’ve got some guinea-pigs coming along to the first “Cracking the Corporate Coffers” day on January 19th, and I’m happy to write more on this topic if it’s of interest.  Click through to my website for details of the training course  www.tessex.co.uk

Next time though, it’s back to the Ten Steps to the Perfect Funding Bid.  I think we’re up to 8b!

©  Tamara Essex 2011

Scroll back to an earlier blog that released the information the Lottery didn’t want you to know – the reasons why most Lottery bids are rejected.  In third place was “not demonstrating value for money”.  This makes this topic incredibly important, yet most people feel it’s incredibly intangible.

Although you will not usually have to show a “unit cost” (ie cost per person / session / event etc), working this out can be a useful internal exercise to give you a sense of whether the project offers good value for money.  For example, a volunteer home-visiting service for social purposes / gardening / dog-walking becomes unrealistic if the “unit cost” works out at £50 per home visit, because you are planning a full-time paid worker with an office and computer, costing you £25,000 pa, and you are estimating 10 home visits per week (500 per year, giving a unit cost of £50). 

On the other hand, a funder will be worried about your project management abilities if you bid too low!  If it looks like you are unaware of some of the related costs of your project (insurance, volunteer expenses, equipment maintenance) they may throw out your bid.  So show ALL the costs, and then what you are bidding for separately.  Including a share of overheads is important, as are volunteer out-of-pocket expenses (NOT a flat daily or sessional rate).

So try out your unit cost on people who aren’t involved in your project or organisation.  Their gut instinct will be similar to those of the Trustees of the charitable trust or foundation.  In other words – they’re not experts either!  You don’t need to be a social care provider or commissioner to know that the befriending / dog-walking / gardening volunteers in the example above are pretty expensive at £50 an hour.

Remember – even though the form might not ask for your costs to be broken down to a unit cost, somebody reading your application will do a rough calculation to work it out.  Some trusts use external appraisers, and they will almost certainly do it!  It’s one of the first things I do when I’m doing appraisals. 

The next blog will outline the two simple ways to reduce the unit cost, to make the project demonstrate better value-for-money. 

©  Tamara Essex 2010

Well it seems to me that the Compact has been largely ignored and inadequately enforced in Local Government and also by central government departments.  It never had teeth, and whilst it was a good idea, if it couldn’t be enforced then it was simply an expensive (and cuttable) quango.  I doubt its passing will be mourned.

Capacitybuilders on the other hand funded a lot of good work …. though their unnecessarily cumbersome monitoring arrangements have been criticised in many places including this blog.  Capacitybuilders employs 42 full-time staff, and has handed out approximately £150 million through Change-Up and the more recent Modernisation Grants. 

Change-Up was serious money that has gone to strengthen voluntary sector infrastructure around the country – often to the enormous benefit of the local VCOs that rely on their infrastructure.   The Modernisation Grants have been invaluable for enabling frontline VCOs to identify for themselves the issues they need to address, and enabling targetted support to be provided by expert external consultants. 

I’m sure admin costs could have been lower at Capacitybuilders.  I certainly think that the monitoring processes could have benefitted from streamlining.  But in the main they have achieved the aims of their funding programmes by strengthening regional and local infrastructure support services, improving the reach of those services to excluded communities, and enabling VCOs to modernise and re-position themselves to better avoid the axe that has, ironically, fallen on Capacitybuilders.

©  Tamara Essex 2010

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  But this is where you have to use your journalistic skills … and by that I mean “Think tabloid” !!!   You only have a line or two to grab the interest of the people reading your funding application – so make the project sound captivating, effective, and significant in those first few words.

After that first crucial line, you need to make sure you cover all the other points too.  Be specific about what the project will do and what the money will be spent on.  Who will benefit (target group, and numbers), exactly what activities will be run, and over what time-scale.

Unless there is a separate question on the application form about outcomes you’ll need to cover those in this section describing the project.  Outomes, or the difference the project will make in the longer term, are a crucial part of the application.  See Step 5 earlier in this blog for guidance on expressing outcomes.

Charitable trusts and foundations that don’t supply an application form will often say that your proposal should consist of a single-sided letter, and a bid on no more than two sides.  This is good practice and you should be able to give all the information needed, as described throughout these Ten Steps to the Perfect Funding Bid, on two sides – and even include a photograph if there’s a good one that well illustrates your project.

The hardest bit is finding that great opening line.  It needs to grab the reader’s attention, as well as showing that your project absolutely meets the funder’s priorities and will reflect well on them.  Ask your friends and family as well as colleagues to read your bid – it may be someone surprising who gives you that great line that will make your bid stand out!  I have seen incredibly valuable and important services described in such dull ways as to almost guarantee the bid hits the bottom of the wastepaper bin (the dreaded WPB).   Make friends with a journalist or a marketing professional and see if you can persuade them to help you come up with that opening line.  For free, of course!  

Don’t forget that the NUMBER ONE reason bids are rejected by the Lottery is not adequately meeting the priorities of the funding stream, so follow up that opening line with a line that contains one or more of the charitable trust’s own priorities, to demonstrate how you clearly parallel the interests and passions of the trustees, and you should avoid the WPB.

©  Tamara Essex 2010