Archives: personal productivity

This webinar sponsored by the Appalachian Regional Comprehensive Center at Edvantia was held on December 14, 2009. Deborah Ward of Ward and Associates presented during the webinar. She is a “nationally recognized proposal writing consultant for education and nonprofit clients.” Below are highlights from her presentation. Many of the points are common sense but probably bear repeating.

• Start with an idea that closely aligns with what the funder wants to fund.
• Think about what you hope to accomplish. What is the scope and depth of the project?
• Is the project innovative? Make sure that the idea you have hasn’t been funded before. The grantor will be looking for something new and different.
• Does the project use best practices? You will need the most up-to-date information that you can get.
• It is easier to find funders with a concept in mind.
• Read the Request for Proposal very carefully, using a highlighter so that you don’t miss any important facts. What to look for:
  • Purpose of the grant funding
  • Eligibility requirements
  • Deadline
  • Proposal section instructions (critical piece)
  • Page limit, fonts, and margins
• Funders will toss out a proposal without looking at it if it doesn’t follow the instructions and use the correct font and margins and goes over the page limit.
• Your organization may serve as a partner with another organization. A memorandum of understanding is needed.
• Buzzwords and acronyms
  • Spell out the words for the acronyms
  • Define words if needed; don’t make assumptions (for instance, “at risk” might mean something else than what you want it to mean.)

Proposal Selection Instructions

Use the proposal section instructions with the scoring criteria if it is included in the Request for Proposal.
Common proposal sections:

1. Needs statement/problem statement
   1. Support with data, surveys, teacher input, etc.
   2. Do more than identify research: explain what you want to do.
2. Goals and Objectives
   1. You need to be realistic. The project should be doable within the grant period.
   2. Goals and objectives should be measurable.
3. Methodology
   1. Describe the what, where, when, and who for the project.
   2. If you are including professional development, be sure to describe it. Make sure it is current.
   3. Identify who will be doing the project and what the follow-up will be.
4. Personnel and staff
   1. Who is responsible for carrying out the project and their responsibilities and why they are the right staff to do this.
5. Evaluation
   1. Will you use an internal or external evaluator? Check the budget to see if there is money included to hire an evaluator.
   2. What evaluation tools will you use? Go back and look at your goals and objectives.
   3. Ask an evaluator to write this section of the proposal. They can better articulate the evaluation tools they will be using.
   4. Colleges and universities have internal evaluators. Also, contact prior grantees and ask them who they used.
   5. The American Evaluation Association website, http://www.eval.org, has a “Find an evaluator” section.
6. Budget
   1. What are the allowable costs?
   2. Make sure the numbers are real.
   3. Create a budget narrative and show calculations. Look for a budget narrative sample through an internet search to see how this is done.
   4. Spell out how much money is needed and why. Include every single line item and discuss this in the narrative.
   5. Don’t make numbers up.
   6. Recheck the addition!
   7. The funding is for the project only, not operational costs.
   8. If including technology in the budget, make sure to justify it in the narrative rather than creating a wish list. Explain why you are selecting specific technology to use in the project.
7. Appendix
   1. Can you include an appendix in the proposal?
   2. Do not put material in the appendix that should be in the narrative.
   3. Don’t overload this area. Most reviewers will only spend a few minutes looking at it.

More things to think about

• Sustainability — Think how you will sustain parts of the project after the funding period. Consider revenue generating options. Expand professional development.
• Partial vs. full funding — Negotiate if necessary. Be clear about what is going to be funded. A revised budget may be needed. A revision to the proposal may also be needed. Ask the funder for a good length of time to work out what it means to your project to have partial funding.
• Scoring before submission — Give the proposal draft to others, including the scoring criteria to identify possible weaknesses in the proposal.
• Look a funded proposals — Get at least one copy of a funded proposal to look at for content, scope and formatting. Look at prior grantees and ask to see how their projects were funded.

Writing a better proposal

• Use clear and precise language
• Make sure that the deadlines and budget information match throughout the proposal.
• Give a draft to a grant writing professional or have them write it. Be clear about their role in the process.
• Use the Request for Proposal guidance and scoring criteria and use the points as a guide also.

For your next presentation, consider using this tactic to keep people involved with LEARN NC.

On Tuesday, Emily and I presented some LEARN NC resources to Wake County middle and high school teachers. They were a receptive bunch, and our resources went over well. In addition to handing out flyers and lanyards, we passed around an email sign-up sheet so people could sign up for email updates (we put our names and email addresses on the sheet so they could see how to fill out the form, as well as so they could see our email addresses). They could choose to receive updates for general LEARN NC news, as well as professional development updates. After the presentation, we sent an email listing links to all the resources we talked about (Digital Textbook, standard course of study, Instructify, PD) plus a few we didn’t have time for (DiscoverNC, The First Year, Ed Reference).

If you’re underwhelmed by our strategy, I don’t blame you. A clipboard and a pen (even a snazzy LEARN NC pen) are as low-tech as it gets. Besides, folks can sign up for email updates very easily from the LEARN NC website. So why bother?

In my opinion, when asking people to take action, no matter how simple it is, your odds of success are inversely proportional to the number of barriers in their way. While someone can easily go to the site and sign up, they can just as easily decide to check their email instead. Or maybe they’ll visit the site and forget to sign up. Or they can’t find the email updates link (I confess I often miss things right in front of me). Or maybe all the enthusiasm they built up during the presentation has been overwhelmed by test scores, grading and lunch duty. Putting a sign-up sheet and pen in their hands right there and then removes all potential distractions or avenues for procrastination. If they’re not interested, they pass the clipboard along, no harm done. If they are interested, they sign up, and we don’t have to worry that any potential LEARNatics slid off the hook.

Further, sending a follow-up email gives them a direct line to the people they talked to, in case they have questions or ideas. Sure, we had business cards ready during the presentation. But are you more likely to type in the email address of a speaker who gave out a business card, or hit “reply” to an email from the friendly presenter who reminded you of the URL to that neat Digital Textbook project?

In case you’re wondering, we got 23 signatures — roughly one-third of the attendees — all but two of whom signed up for both general updates and professional development updates. I honestly don’t know if that’s a lot, but I’d bet you 11 American dollars that’s at least double what we would have gotten had we just asked them to sign up at the website later.

It’s possible, of course, that all of these folks will unsubscribe once they get their first email from us. It’s also possible — even likely — that at least a few will forward some of the information on to a friend who they think could benefit from it. Remember, each person we speak to is a potential LEARN NC evangelist, and I’m all for making it as easy as possible for them to spread the word to their friends. For them to do that, though, they first have to be excited about what we do. And if they’re new to LEARN NC, the time when they’re most excited is moments after we’ve just shown them all the great stuff we can do. Why risk letting that enthusiasm fade away? Sign them up on the spot so we can keep them in the loop.

We had a productive meeting with Angela Bardeen and Chad Haefele from the UNC libraries. So many of the periodicals we would like to read are already part of the Libraries’ subscription services. Besides, with our work loads it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll keep up with reading our journals, so it seems even more foolish to subscribe to print editions.

Setting up an RSS feed from brings the most current articles to your desktop and offers an opportunity to stay current with a small investment of time and no investment of money. We spent about an hour working to get feeds in three RSS environments: Pageflakes, iGoogle and Google Reader.

Pageflakes and iGoogle provide a dashboard-type widget-intensive option that many of us find useful. If you need help with Pageflakes, Bobby and I are using that pretty extensively. Gail was working in iGoogle. Google Reader is easier to set up, I think, but requires you to actually go to another place to read your feeds… unless you cheat and use a web page widget in your Pageflakes to display your Google Reader feeds, like I do!

Bottom line, it was pretty easy to get the subscription content from some of the vendors, namely EBSCOhost, CSA, Gale and ISI, working in our various readers of choice. RSS feeds are still “experimental” in these products, so there is no guarantee that it will always work (as we experienced ourselves Tuesday morning!). Our library guides reassured us that if we persevere, we will get the feeds working just as we need them to, and if we get stuck, they are just an email or phone call away.

Contact Angela or Chad if you have any questions or need further assistance:
bardeen at email.unc.edu
chaefele at email.unc.edu
or by phone 919-962-1151

I am, as usual, beating myself up about a failure to do something perfectly. (“Must get A. OK, A+ works, too.”) I have been warned by friends and colleagues, coached by professionals, and reassured by family members that it is OK to NOT to do everything to the nth degree, OK not to be perfect. Rumor has it that there is a RANGE of acceptable performance on various endeavors. Who knew? Apparently that range is NOT, as I have always maintained, A to A+, but rather there are other options, including B and C!

So what am I stewing about now? Getting Things Done. I read it (OK, well almost all of it) and I worked to put it in place and yet I have not systematized this, I am still struggling. What should I do? Renew my commitment to this program? Quit?

[This is how it is for perfectionists, BTW, you either do it perfect or you quit 'cause you are not doing it perfect.]

Turns out lots of people struggle to GTD and that it is OK to do something different. According to the author, David Allen, I need some version of “collect” so I can externalize all the stuff spinning in my head and I can get the bandwidth to be productive. In an interview about his new book, he says “It takes a couple of years for most people to really, really, really begin to integrate that so that that builds the consequential and sort of cruise control kinds of behaviors.” Years. I don’t have to quit, I just need to make it OK to not get an A+, OK to not know how to do it in the first month, OK take the time it takes to systematize. I can do that, right?

As an economics major, I know widgets. I have considered the elasticity of demand for widgets, the consumer surplus when widgets are priced competitively, and the change in price when the component materials for making widgets are suddenly more scarce. Always, my professors discussed economic concepts in terms of widgets.

Now, today, I am actually using widgets! Thanks to Widgetbox, I can easily create a way to keep up with ever-changing content like the LEARN NC features and the latest Instructify articles. I’ve even created one for this blog.

Just this morning, Bobby and I were discussing how we really need something to pull together the fiftyleven things we need to update, read, check, and generally pay attention to. How can we keep up with it all?

Pageflakes might just help me, as they promise in their byline, Get it Together. Using this tool, I can pull together the news, online tools, blogs and more that I am trying to keep up with. I can even create widgets and with one click, put them on my Pageflakes page. Pretty cool, eh?