By Karan Gupta
Karan Gupta is a public health professional with extensive experience in working with NGOs and fundraising campaigns. His public health training and professional experiences have helped him gain expert knowledge of qualitative and quantitative research methods, managing donor relations, conducting periodic audits and evaluations to measure program performance, risk assessments and modeling costs of key NGO interventions.
The executive management team of any NGO should have checks on the types of programs it adopts. Whether the organization has a narrow focus or intends to broaden its strategy, it will be presented with many opportunities for new programs. Some of these opportunities may not be in line with the core organization strategy. In other cases, there will be multiple ways to develop a new program, some of which will be better suited to the organization strategy and model.
The executive management team should follow a simple process to review, refine, and approve new projects developed at the NGO. The purpose of this process is to maximize impact by helping teams to develop and fund programs that will best contribute to large-scale change. It is not designed to stifle entrepreneurialism, but rather support entrepreneurial teams and individuals in identifying and refining high-potential programs and ensuring that the organization’s finite capacity and resources are focused on those programs.
Before implementing or submitting a funding request for a new project, all teams should submit a brief concept document for review and approval. The concept should then be reviewed and discussed by the New Projects Review Committee. All new projects that are developed within the organization should be submitted for approval as far in advance as possible of deadlines for submission to donors. In addition, extensions to existing projects should be submitted if there is a substantial change in approach from the work to date. Early submission of project concepts will prevent last-minute “fire-fighting” and major revisions to full proposals that can occupy significant amounts of time.
The committee should reach one of three decisions on a concept:
- Approved – The team can immediately move forward with initial fundraising efforts and/or full proposal development. The team will be assigned one member of the committee who will review and approve the final proposal(s) for the project before it is submitted to a donor.
- Refine – The project concept has substantial potential, but needs to be changed in critical areas in order to align with the NGO model and strategy and achieve maximum impact. The committee will provide suggestions for the how the team can refine the concept and/or arrange a meeting or conference call to provide direct feedback and contribute as “thought partners” to the refinement.
- Declined – The committee determines that this is not a project that the NGO should engage in at this time. The team should not begin relevant proposal development, fundraising or implementation, though can propose a revised approach to the issue.
Teams are encouraged to develop the concept documents with other relevant teams and individuals in the organization to strengthen the concept. This process is intended to be a light-touch process so effort will be made to rapidly reach decisions and minimize the additional burden on teams throughout the organization.
All proposals should be reviewed and approved by the assigned committee member prior to submission. As a reminder, all proposals should have a member of the Budgeting and Reporting Team review the budget and the Contracts Team may also need to review and comments on documents. Draft proposal documents should be sent to the Finance team with ample time for these reviews and any additional iteration that may be required.
