Styles of involvement in project development

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This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

There’s no one way you can be part of project development. It seemed helpful to lay out some options to help you: be clear where you are and where you want to be; and to help ensure clarity internally about who’s doing what.

Some of the following options would be controversial in some quarters, for a trust fundraiser. I discuss the arguments for and against being more than a critical friend in the page “Who has what role” under the “Working with Services” sub-menu. This section is about clearly defining your role in different scenarios:

A. Critical friend

The classic way we’re normally involved… There are things that won’t be ready and sometimes things the Services people developing the project won’t have thought of. Your views will be respected and you can even make occasional suggestions, but no one expects you to be the expert. You own nothing, but if you didn’t play your part, everyone would be disappointed.

As a critical friend, you also need to be an influencer. About 90% of the material in the “Internal” menu of this website is potentially useful, just as a critical friend.

Even in “critical friend” mode, one role you can usefully play is ensuring the structure of a bid and a project is there, because to a beginner it’s not obvious what’s needed. I’ve had plenty of Services staff who were newbies in the project development world who have thanked me for helping them think through a quite difficult process. Some of the Services staff I’ve been closest to have been the ones I’ve helped think things through as a critical friend.

B. Coordinator

Ostensibly you’re coordinating the development of the application, but because the project is being put together for the application, you’re also coordinating the development of the project. If things don’t come together in time, the buck may stop with you. If there’s a reason for writing this page, it’s to highlight that this role is a serious consideration and to give you a checklist of tasks to cover. 

The timelines for development are probably owned by services, but either way you’re actively involved: 

• Creating a workable timeline that should ensure delivery of a shiny new project written up on the forms, all signed off in good time
• Managing that timeline: you need to be very clear where everything is, especially with regard to the critical path (or critical chain, if you’re being extremely swanky and sophisticated in your coordination)
• Creating systems for coordination;
• Ensuring there’s structure
• Ensuring everyone is getting their say at the appropriate point and appropriate way (e.g., bid team meetings)
• Linking people together
• Spotting when people’s development work isn’t tying up and ensuring it does
• Ensuring the project is still within the defined scope / managing any changes
• Ensuring quality
• Checking in that everything’s being addressed and is on track, taking action when it isn’t

There’s a lot to this, especially with a big grant or a partnership. I did a £3m government grant application once where I typically didn’t get onto my “own” work until about midday, each day, because there was so much coordination to do. (They were longer days.) I like to do this work first in the day, because if there are problems, everyone is a day behind. Getting the bid out is a project in itself and getting to that point is the most pure project management you’ll do as a trust fundraiser.

C. Development support worker

As an experienced trust fundraiser, you should have plenty of knowledge and skills you can potentially contribute, at least in a rough and ready way, to the project development. At this stage, though, we’re straying into tricky issues of (1) ownership of the work (which must, finally, rest with Services) and (2) ensuring quality, given that you aren’t the charity’s expert in whatever the service is.

What you can do is rough things out. The challenge you have is getting Services to check and adopt your work! If there’s time, a good way to address this is a read-through meeting with the Services manager as part of the approvals process (rather than just pinging it to them, and their maybe saying “Yeah… all 30 page of that detail looks great, just as it is, we’re good to go.”)

The following are some examples of this kind of work:

a. Identifying evaluations and good practice guides

People who’ve read lots of pages of this web site will probably be fed up with me constantly referencing this. So – I’ll point you to the “Using Toolkits” webpage in the “Development” sub-menu.

b. Leg work on budgeting

See the page on budgeting in the “Development” sub-menu.

c. Service user involvement

See the page on this in the “Development” sub-menu.

d. Writing some of the easier sections of the form

It is of course a fiction to say that somehow when you write the proposal you aren’t developing the project. You can perfectly well draft some of the sections and then get services to rework them, your having broken the back of the work. 

Sometimes this is because they’re so easy. In other cases it might be because neither you nor Services are experts at that section, but you each have things you can usefully contribute and it happens to make sense if you have a stab, first.

1. Risk analysis
2. GANTT chart / similar time plan
3. Equalities
4. Project management
5. Timeline
6. Monitoring
7. Project-related issues that naturally fit the parts of the form you’d normally take (e.g.: need; how the work relates to the objectives of the funder)

D. Development officer

I’ve occasionally been an ad hoc development officer, actively leading on putting the project together. There are two scenarios where this has worked for me:

(1) There are Services staff to own all elements of the work, but the person owning the overarching concept is a senior manager, who doesn’t have time to get things right. 

A good example would be: at a visual impairment charity we had Assistive Tech specialists embedded in teams around the country, but we wanted to intensify the work in rural areas. I was given a brief by my Deputy Director, with an agreed (very ballpark) budget and staffing and I worked with different AT Coordinators to come up with a set of objectives that reflected the particular issues in rural areas (e.g., outreach, older people, recruitment of staff). Working with the different specialists and local team managers, I worked up the elements that made this a project: consultations with/linkages into local services; job descriptions for new staff; detailed budgets; management and coordination arrangements; good practice network and process for creating a toolkit; agreeing consistent targets and monitoring; and so on. All of that used generic skills (including equalities adaptations) that a good trust fundraiser can develop.

(2) The project is very easy – or at least, it is with the advice that there is around. For example, I put together a volunteer recruitment programme for a national network. There were lots of “how to” materials around, there was a volunteer manager to advise, who perhaps should have owned this task but who wouldn’t, and there were plenty of volunteer coordinators in the network whom I could ring for ideas.

Key considerations are:

1. There’s an overall brief from, and ownership by, a senior manager. They may become your functional manager (if not your line manager) for this initiative (or that role may be filled by a Services manager. You have to be working for someone on this task.)
2. All relevant senior managers and Services staff agree that it’s your role (and where appropriate, a good use of your time). You have to agree as well, when you look at how you’re going to meet your income targets!
3. There’s very good communication between yourself and Services, as you are sitting there defining their project. If one party or other doesn’t share what they’ve been making up, the application will have inconsistencies in it.
4. You’re sure the work will be properly checked by Services (inconsistencies and mistakes are serious possibilities) and genuinely owned by Services when it’s finished. If they’ve been through and made changes, they’re more likely to have bought in, so that’s another reason to push them to check things. It can be effective to have a meeting with the Service manager to go through key sections of the text, highlighting things that are in it and checking them off to ensure they’re correct and there’s real buy-in.

E. Development lead

If your background is right for proper ownership, you might be the lead on this. For example, at a national umbrella body I wrote various grants schemes where we got trusts to delegate their grant making to us. I was able to pick up standard grant criteria and processes and use my own experience as a grantmaker to write a grants scheme, that was then agreed with the Head of Grants and put to the funder.