This section explains what kind of questions you will need to ask and work on in order to decide what project to develop, and then how to develop that project.You will first need to decide who to involve in planning your project. This depends on your preferred approach and individual capacity as well as on ‘best practice’ recommendations.
If you are going to need the support of others to deliver the project or to help you ‘network’ in the community (either the whole community, or individuals within it) then getting them to input and help shape your project may foster more support for the project in the future.
When asking others for their input it is vital that you listen. Wherever it makes sense to the overall aim of the project, you should integrate others’ feedback in your planning so they can see their input was valued.
Developing a project – stage one
In order to generate ideas, sit down together and write down all your different – and wildest – ideas to get them onto paper.
- Once you have come up with some initial ideas, you can start to research whether there are a funders who might be interested in funding projects you develop.
- You will then need to demonstrate to others why your project needs to happen.
- Next you’ll need to explore who else (if anyone) is delivering the kind of project that you want to deliver, or might be better placed to deliver it.
- Once you have explored potential funding and investigated which organisations are carrying out similar work, you will need to agree which project idea (or ideas) to fully develop.
Stage two
Once you have decided what you want to do, and have some strong evidence as to why this work is really important, you can start to think through some of the details of your project proposal.
- You will need to decide who is going to be responsible for leading on the delivery of the project, and who is going to oversee the project’s delivery
- To secure funding, you may need to demonstrate that those who will deliver and oversee the project have the skills to do so.
- You will also need to define your deliverables (the end product of your work) and your activities (how you will achieve these outcomes).
- To deliver your project you will need to come up with a ‘plan’ for delivery. To do this you need to think through the key activities you will need to do in order to get it up and running, as well as what you will need to do to deliver the project.
- You will need to know how much your project is going to cost - to develop your budget you need to think through every activity in detail.
- You will also need an exit strategy - think about what, realistically, will happen to your project at the end of this funding period.
Other things you might want to consider include:
- Monitoring and evaluation, key performance indicators and quality control
- Risk analysis
- Anything your are definitely excluding from the project
- Any assumptions you are making that could affect the project’s success.
This page is a summary of the information contained in the full online toolkit.
